IMDb #242 Review: The Graduate (1967)

Source: Wikipedia

Apparently, once a college overachiever gets slapped with a diploma, he dissolves into a tepid milksop inexplicably attractive to the opposite sex.

Apparently, adults are self-absorbed, socially myopic, manipulative bastards. Moreover, they spew unsolicited advice at slightest provocation (e.g., breathing), enforce tyrannical control of their grown children, and make sexual advances on said children despite being middle-aged and married.

Apparently.

Being somewhat sensible, the title character (very young Dustin Hoffman) worries about his future. Not that he’s inclined to do much except brood. Then the icy-hot temptress Mrs. Robinson slinks into his life, just like the enormous spider crawling down the back of your neck right now.

Mrs. Robinson’s motives are murkier than your spider’s, who at least has a warm place to snuggle into before an immanent squashing. The white wannabe-widow’s methods are far more deplorable. She tests, teases, tantalizes her way into the protagonist’s pants, to less than surprising results. Our hero exhibits the moral fortitude and emotional range of a moist wank-rag.

To complicate things, the hot mom’s hotter daughter drops in from Berkeley. Things happen. (Apparently, confidence is a sexually transmitted disease.)

Just because I cringed every scene doesn’t make the movie bad. The dialogue’s realistic, the situations believable, the tan lines staggering.

And the music. Simon and Garfunkel nail the soundtrack–to the wall, by the ears. Their tingly harmonies enrich montages of boring airports, lonesome moping, and speeding in the red hot rod/portable Freudian metaphor.

Recommended for the happily married, the unhappily matriculated, and shotgun wedding planners.

105 minutes.