Review of The Swimmer (1968) by Gareth S — 05 Apr 2008

Burt Lancaster plays suburbanite- businessman Ned Merrill in a wonderfully delirious emotional puzzle of a picture based on a short story by the uniquely American John Cheever -- a contemporary Quixotic quest of swimming across a tony Connecticut county through the pools of his wealthy, familiar neighbors, friends, rivals and lovers on his way home to his wife and his girls who are "playing tennis", always "playing tennis". Yet, for all its sunny skies (there are clouds on the horizon), green forests (filled with thistles) and (chlorine) blue waters, this is a nightmare movie -- a movie about a man (and, in some respects, an entire era) in denial and, indeed, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Despite its period signifiers -- the manual camera zooms, camera flared dissolves, a giddy Marvin Hamlisch score, and the cultural sign posts (actually, many of its class, age, sex, and race notations are still weirdly relevant), this is a universally caustic vision, a gin-soaked myth, and all the more seductive for that universality. It is, maybe, Lancaster's best performance (he bought the short story and is a producer here) and he personifies a kind of man's man, a Master of the Universe on Wall Street or the boardrooms of "Mad Men". But his essential flaws, and maybe those of his entire generation, have sent him on a sun-glistened, martini-shaken voyage of the damned that the movie gives him no solace from, despite his broad smile and the eternal twinkle in his strangely clear blue eyes. Near the end, he spends time with his former mistress, by her pool; she's a stage actress, who bitterly shares the drinks he pours (Bullshots) and listens to his lame, and misguided, recollections of their past. It's bravura stuff from both Lancaster and the under-appreciated Janice Rule -- a near fifteen minute sequence of delusion, melancholy, and bile. When Ned Merill finally arrives "home", after suffering the "indignities" of wading through the lower classes at a public pool, we experience a profound revelation that he can never have and we realize that Ned Merrill's odyssey is one of both time and imagination -- and both are horrifying.

But did I mention that this is one of the most dreamily entertaining pictures you may ever see? It is.