"
The Graduate" follows Benjamin, a graduate, who's a little worried about his future. He's sick of being trapped in a materialistic bubble, and strives to be different from what his folks planned for him to be. Being in my senior year myself, I naturally gravitated towards this kind of theme, and totally understood where Hoffman's character was coming from. The feeling of wanting to do something substantial but not knowing exactly what, is something that most of us will go through at some point of our lives.
Benjamin's struggles lead him to an encounter with a friend of his parents, and things escalate between them to the point of having an affair with each other. We are also introduced to the daughter of said friend, and things also escalate between her and Ben to the point of falling in love with each other. So now, our main character is in a sticky situation, where he's basically been sleeping with the mother of the girl he became to love. Yikes!
I do think director Mike Nichols, solely elevated the given material, his approach definitely differentiates the film from the other cheesy flicks tackling similar themes, and don't get me wrong, I do think this film can be incredibly cheesy (it's a 60's film after all...), but it does enough to make me disregard that, not to mention, I think the film recognises its own goofiness at points, and subtly pokes fun at it.
There's a lot of clever symbolism and imagery that visually provides information about Benjamin's state of mind, and I really liked that. And while everyone seems to be going on about Dustin Hoffman's performance, I was quite underwhelmed by him, I thought he was fantastic in "
All the President's Men", but here, he was quite hit or miss. It is the cinematography what I was most impressed by, I seriously didn't expect the film to look as stunning as it did. The song choices are pretty good as well, I'm even listening to "Sound of Silence" while typing all of this.
Now for the ending, I of course thought it was great, but I saw it coming, because it was already hidden and repressed in my memory, so as soon as I saw the sight of Katharine Ross in a wedding dress, it emerged, thus ruining the remaining minutes of the film, so thank you pop culture for not letting me experience anything as it was originally intended...I'm only mentioning this due to how often I fall victim of having a film spoiled, in the middle of watching it, because of repressed pop culture references popping out in my head, not only is it annoying, but also quite discouraging.
Anyway, "
The Graduate" was pretty good, and I'm glad I finally watched it, so thank you @
Stirchley for nominating it.