alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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The first time I watched it, I was a freshman in college and I could barely get through it. I hated the sense of awkwardness and what read to me at the time (2012) as intentionally cringe humor.
The second time, I had graduated college, seen more of the world and how people treated each other, and I felt like I got it a lot more. I didn't feel offended by the long awkward moments anymore. It was entertaining and I was able to see the virtues and flaws of the characters, and even recognize traits of myself and other people I knew.
I can't remember for sure whether I've seen it a third time, but I think I have, and it would have been in my mid or late twenties. With that watching, I was able to appreciate it most as a film and a product of its time, and imagine how it might have landed to its audience over the years. My recollection of it now is of someone who is by nature a pretty passive person struggling with the concept of his own agency, which speaks to me personally.
I'm old enough to have seen it when I was in high school in the late 70s. More than a decade after its release it still seemed pretty relevant and edgy. Unless your parents were outliers, in the 70s most suburban parents were pretty 'square' and the sort of existential meltdown rebellion at the end wasn't generally part of mainstream culture.
The film's issues wouldn't speak to today's young Americans, many of whose parents are (outwardly) too individualistic even for a mid-1960s beatnik.
If someone made an updated version of The Graduate, it would have to pick on a different version of conformity - maybe on "I'm different just like everyone else".
An opportune time for a remake would be the 2010s when working at FANG had a similar cachet to working in "plastics"
Like Simon and Garfunkle (at their peak at the time), the film was very much a part of its time... 1967. SO much has changed since then, including the uptightness. Without that zeitgeist, that movie loses much of its power.
I was blown away by it—still am. It's easily in my top 5 films of all time. Maybe the funniest movie I have seen. And it spoke (I think) not only to the generation of boomers that felt they were under the thumbs of their demanding parents, but speaks to all coming-of-age young adults.
(Such a brilliant edit: https://youtu.be/5FJaoRLpf7M?si=iAinUlOIZw3u89Jw&t=85)
I like it, I was and still am in the age range to relate to the young two main characters and their whimsy though.
In my opinion the thing that aged the worst was the soundtrack. The Simon & Garfunkel songs from this movie are so iconic and timeless at this point that it doesn't feel like a soundtrack to me but like someone made a TikTok edit and put those songs over the film, if that makes sense. Nobody in my generation knows the connection between those songs they heard as part of pop culture and The Graduate. This is an impossible psychological barrier to pass for me. Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" cannot dissolve into any movie's soundtrack for me when used unironically because I consider it a meme song (Mrs. Robinson as well to a lesser extent). It certainly would not have felt that way back then. I don't feel that way about modern songs with modern movies even though I recognize it is the exact same situation.