Surviving "The Graduate"

Something that I was mulling on just the other day. As I grow in my career, on a day to day basis I feel like I'm failing or doing things badly. Maybe because I have no comparison frame for it, because of the growth. Maybe because it's never possible, while you're in the thick of a project, to provide that post-hoc history. The open-endedness feels weird compared with clear causality.

Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability. Time will tell.

Wow, gorgeous writing, Ariel Levy was the perfect choice for helping write this.

As an aside, I admire Mike Nichols' ability to make gorgeous _looking_ movies. Many scenes from The Graduate, the State Island Ferry opening scene in The Working Girl, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And even the 2003 movie Closer. That is almost a 40-year span.

Atypically, he worked with 13 different cinematographers across his 19 movies. Woody Allen, as a contrast, as prolific as he is as Mike Nichols was not, used similar quantity of cinematographers across ~50 movies. Woody Allen, only because, I find his movies visually beautiful, too.

In the New Yorker article linked above, for me this stood out:

"Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts."

Reminds me of high-IP people inside Frontier Labs :).

For anyone not familiar with "The Graduate" or wants a refreshed, this analysis by Steven Benedict is as good as anyway:

https://www.stevenbenedict.ie/2012/12/the-graduate/

(9 minute audio essay.)

I wonder if it's just me, or if the movie did not age well. I saw it for the first time around 10 years ago, and I was really expecting great things since I was a fan of hoffman and of simon and garfunkel. i found it a very lacklustre movie, nothing I had read about hoffman's iconic performance really landed for me, and the movie as a whole seemed dull and unconvincing. it wasn't a patch on kramer vs kramer or even tootsie.

People posting here are perhaps missing that it is a comedy - with a bit of tragedy right at the end.

https://archive.ph/Eqn1F

Here is my hot take. His belief that he was failing, helped him succeed.

I don't mean this in a trite way. The character portrayed is supposed to be awkward and anxious. Feeling awkward and anxious in real life, left him in the right frame of mind when he walked on set. He looked awkward and anxious, because he actually was.

Actually feeling what the character is supposed to be feeling, is the heart of method acting. The upside of method acting is that it creates very powerful performances. The downside of method acting is that you have to experience all of the feelings of the depicted drama.

Maybe the movie was successful because we could relate to Hoffman, while Redford (probably the handsomest actor ever) being rejected was not relatable.

I remember watching and discussing this film in a film appreciation class. Neat to hear Hoffman's side of it (though it sounds like it wasn't a good time).

The graduate is a strange movie for me. I watched it in my late teens and easily identified with Hoffman's character and saw it through his eyes. Seeing it later as a married middle aged man I kind of despised him and his choices.

[dead]

Why now? These events were 60 years ago.