Review of The Swimmer (1968) by Chris M — 19 Apr 2009

I wish this film had been directed by someone like Hal Ashby or Arthur Penn, a director that would have mined it for more black humor and less sentiment. And I also wish the DVD had come with a special feature that would have allowed me to watch the film without hearing Marvin Hamlisch's overwrought score.

Maybe if Perry had meant the score to be a parody of such scores, I would have liked the film even more, but probably not. There are other flaws as well: awkward inserts, lazy continuity, a loopy montage that amounts to nothing (corrected quickly, though, by a totally inspired loopy montage), and a nearly Italian reliance on post-dubbing.

But I digress, because what I really want to say is how fantastically weird this film is, and how unexpectedly penetrating its critique of American suburbia is; it's the kind of trenchant drama Mendes's "Revolutionary Road" so desperately wants to be.

For all of my griping about Perry's direction, he does an admirable job of turning a literary conceit into a thoroughly engaging film. He couldn't have done it, though, without Burt Lancaster giving one of the best performances of his career.

Lancaster always had a tendency to deliver his lines as if they were aimed off stage, an odd choice in a movie actor. As a result, his characters typically seem to think they're bigger and better than their surroundings.

Lancaster doesn't act with his fellow players, so much as he acts near them. All of which works perfectly in this film, wherein Lancaster plays an aging lothario--a washed up "suburban stud," as an old flame retorts--whose sense of himself is drastically, grotesquely out of step with the way everyone else in his community sees him.

We might have hated him, but there's a glint in Lancaster's baby blue eyes that makes him so convincing and winning that, when his sense of self unravels and he completely falls apart, we mourn his loss as tragedy, not comedy.

If this would have been better in the hands of an Ashby or Penn 40 years ago, I'd also love to see Soderbergh or Alexander Payne take a crack at it today, with Clooney in the lead.