Tribute to a Film Classic

DATE November 23, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript

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Review: John Powers on the new 40th anniversary edition DVD of
"The Graduate"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

We'll conclude our salute to the 40th anniversary of "The Graduate" by having
our critic at large, John Powers, revisit the film for the first time in 40
years.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

I was a sophomore in high school when "The Graduate" first opened, and I still
remember sitting in that Omaha theater and feeling a new kind of thrill wash
over me. I'd loved many movies before, but this was the first one that seemed
to have been made just for me. In thinking this, of course, I was like
millions of others who thought exactly the same thing. Which is one reason
"The Graduate" instantly became a touchstone that helped define a whole era.
I went to see it again and again during its first run, maybe 10 times in all,
but, protecting its place in my memory, I didn't watch it again until
recently, when I got the 40th anniversary DVD. I popped the disc into the
player with trepidation, but from the opening strains of Simon and Garfunkel
singing, "Hello, darkness, my old friend," I was hooked and relieved.

"The Graduate" still plays like gangbusters. Wonderfully directed by Mike
Nichols, it's funny and staged with startling vividness. Back then, Hollywood
directors were cribbing great visual ideas from European art movies.

No doubt you know the story. A sly, fresh-faced Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin
Braddock, who returns home from college to the LA of sunshine and swimming
pools. Everybody is pushing him towards a prosperous, middle-class future,
famously captured in a single word of advice: "plastics." But Ben wants
something more authentic, and he finds it in the form of Elaine Robinson.
That's Katherine Ross, the coed daughter of his father's partner. But there's
one huge stumbling block: Ben's having an affair with her mother, the worldly
alcoholic Mrs. Robinson, played with indelible foxiness by Anne Bancroft,
whose crossing and uncrossing legs are as eloquent as any monologue. Her
scenes with Ben are modern classics, like this early one, when she invites the
naive graduate back to her house and he starts to panic.

(Soundbite of "The Graduate")

Mr. DUSTIN HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Oh my God.

Ms. ANNE BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Pardon?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Oh, no, Mrs. Robinson, oh, no.

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) What's wrong?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Mrs. Robinson, you didn't--I mean, you
didn't expect...

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) What?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) I mean, you didn't really think I'd do
something like that?

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Like what?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) What do you think?

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) Well, I don't know.

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) For God's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we
are. You got me into your house, you give me a drink. You put on music. Now
you start opening up your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't
be home for hours...

Ms. BANCROFT: (As Mrs. Robinson) So?

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce
me.

(Mrs. Robinson laughs)

Mr. HOFFMAN: (As Benjamin Braddock) Aren't you?

(End of soundbite)

Mr. POWERS: Watching "The Graduate" again flooded me with old passions. All
that anxious isolation and thwarted romanticism. But I couldn't help noticing
things that had escaped my teenage eyes. Despite hitting the zeitgeist, the
movie was actually a bit behind the times. Based on a novel from 1963--a
different cultural era, really--it celebrates a brand of timid, youthful
innocence that many of Ben and Elaine's contemporaries were happily shedding.
In fact, "The Graduate" represents a fundamental step in the media's
domestication of what we think of as the '60s. The movie came out in the days
of civil rights marches, Vietnam protests, and the summer of love. But none
of these appear here.

Even when Ben chases Elaine to Berkeley, ground zero of student radicalism,
you get nothing more than shots of picturesque quads and a gruff landlord
asking him if he's an agitator. Ben says no, and he's right. You see, he and
Elaine are ciphers, who don't stand for anything more than a generational
rejection of their parents' inauthenticity. It was easy for many of us to
project our own vague feelings of alienation onto Ben and Elaine because their
rebellion didn't make any demands, didn't confer any responsibilities, didn't
prove irrevocable. Their rebel attitudes often look dangerous or apocalyptic,
but, in their way, they proved as safely suburban as what we were all
rebelling against. Small wonder that so many iconoclastic young boomers like
Ben and Elaine would turn into middle-aged bourgeois bohemians.

I now grasp that the real outlaw is, of course, Mrs. Robinson, who, caught in
the era before women's lib, tries to escape the velvet prison of housewifery
in ways that boys like me found very scary. Although she's by far the film's
most interesting character--I'd pick her over the bland Elaine anytime--it
betrays her by turning her into a petty villain who curses like a fishwife
when Ben crashes Elaine's wedding. And we're not supposed to care because
"The Graduate" sides with Ben and Elaine. They're the young ones, and that's
what matters. Maybe so. But today she's the character who now feels the most
daring, the most unconventional and the most human. She's the real rebel
without a cause. I know I'm saying this 40 years too late, but here's to you,
Mrs. Robinson.

BIANCULLI: John Powers is film critic for Vogue.

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Review: David Edelstein reviews "The Mist"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host:

The director Frank Darabont has had good luck in the past adapting the works
of Stephen King, first with "The Shawshank Redemption," then with "The Green
Mile." But those were rare King books outside the horror genre. Now he takes
on monsters from the unknown in "The Mist." Film critic David Edelstein has a
review.

Mr. DAVID EDELSTEIN: "The Mist" is a derivative B horror picture, somehow
raised to the level of a primal scream. All along you think you know what's
to come. All along what comes is worse than you think, and fear. The premise
is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and a little feebleminded.
After a violent storm, an artist played by Thomas Jane, with a house on a lake
in Maine, says to his wife, `Hey, honey, you ever see mist like than on the
lake coming from the direction of that supersecret army lab?' Words to that
effect anyway. The wife says, `No. That is odd.' And the husband says, `Oh
well, better take the truck into town and pick up some supplies at the
supermarket. See you in a flash.' He doesn't see her in a flash. Shortly
after he and his young son, played by Nathan Gamble, arrive at the crowded
market, a man dashes in like a bat out of hell. No, actually, the bats out of
hell arrive later.

(Soundbite of "The Mist")

(Soundbite of sirens)

Unidentified Actor #1: Oh my god.

Unidentified Actor #2: Something in the mist! Something in the mist!

Unidentified Actor #3: Dan!

Actor #2: Took John Lee.

Actor #3: Dan, catch your breath

Actor #2: Shut the doors! Shut the doors! My god! Don't go out there.
There's something in the mist.

(End of soundbite)

EDELSTEIN: Your reaction to that will either be `Ooh, scary,' or `Wow,
cheesy,' but it's hard to laugh off the thunderous rattling of the market's
huge windows or the eeriness of the silence that follows.

The director, Frank Darabont, borrows a lot of Steven Spielberg's visual
prose. The people who melt into and out of the mist recall "Close Encounters
of the Third Kind." But Spielberg's vision was deeply optimistic. Even his
"War of the Worlds" suggested a fierce commitment to family would help
humanity survive an alien onslaught.

"The Mist" is not so sanguine. The idea of a bunch of disparate people
trapped in an enclosed space is a wheezy horror staple, and some of the
dialogue is predictably clunky. But some of it isn't. Characters with
different points of view argue fiercely, and they're all played by great
actors. Andre Braugher as a city lawyer with a lake house is an obstinate
skeptic. Laurie Holden, as the new teacher in town, argues people are
basically good, while an assistant store manager, played by the wonderful Toby
Jones, says unstable humans are prone to violence when the going gets tough.
There's plenty of evidence to support both sides, but dominating all is the
majestic Marcia Gay Harden as the town's religious fanatic. She says the mist
is God's vengeance on a secular society for its wicked ways, echoing remarks
made by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson after 9/11. As all kinds of thingies
invade, she begins to attract a following from a rapt young woman to a market
butcher complete with knife. The threats are from without and within.

The central relationship, though, is between Thomas Jane and his son, who
begins to cling desperately to his dad.

(Soundbite of "The Mist")

Mr. THOMAS JANE: It's all right, Big Bill. I won't be gone long. Just next
door. You'll be safe.

Mr. NATHAN GAMBLE: Daddy, Daddy, there are things out there. Things.

Mr. JANE: Yeah. There's a lot less of them in the daytime.

Mr. GAMBLE: They'll wait. They'll wait in the mist where you can't see them
then when they come you can't get back in. They'll come and eat you up.

Mr. JANE: Sh...

Mr. GAMBLE: Daddy, don't go!

(End of soundbite)

EDELSTEIN: Usually kids in genre movies range from stilted to adequate,
whereas Nathan Gamble, who played one of the affluent children in "Babel," is
so credible and intense it's almost unfair. You can't defend yourself against
these scenes even though you know you probably should. Thomas Jane can be a
little wooden, but not here. Opposite Gamble, he has a tragic dimension.

I won't spoil the film by describing the creatures. Some betray their
computer-generated origins, yet the way the attacks are shot and edited, they
have a fury that's biblical. "The Mist" builds towards a climax so
heartbreaking that I hesitate to recommend it. But I think Darabont earns his
vision. He touches obliquely on so many of our anxieties in this frightening
age--schisms of class and religion; fear of technology's impact on the
environment; fear of God's vengeance or the vengeance of people on behalf of
their God. "The Mist" is the feel-bad movie of the new millennium. It could
be called "The Miasma."

BIANCULLI: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine.
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