The Graduate (1967) - Mike Nichols

After seeing an array of serious and emotionally exhausting films, I decided that I wanted a pick-me-up to lift me out of my “end of winter break” misery. “The Graduate” was in the comedy section on Netflix, and it lands at #189 on the IMDb Top 250, so it seemed a logical choice. 

I knew that “The Graduate” was a classic. There are countless references in today’s culture to the plot line of a confused young man sleeping with an older married woman, all of which know they are simply paying homage to this 1967 film. Not to mention that I knew the line “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me” without even having seen the film (my friend will vouch for me). But what I was unprepared for was a fun night of awkwardness, sexual tension, and corny romantic comedy tropes that just don’t get old.

So there’s a saying I’ve seen around the Internet about the cartoon “Tom and Jerry.” It says that being a kid means rooting for Jerry (the mouse) and being an adult means rooting for Tom (the cat).

I’m at that point where I realize that Jerry is a bully. But because the protagonist of “The Graduate” was just one year older than me at the start of the movie, I found him insanely relatable. Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, has just graduated from college, and is very conflicted about what to do with his life. The film opens on his graduation party, where Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) asks him to take her back to her house. She starts undressing, and Benjamin immediately freaks out.

So the film presents the audience with the awkward, uncomfortable, strange Dustin Hoffman, who one, has know idea what he is doing with his life, and two, has no control over anything that goes on around him. So naturally I found him painfully relatable. His parents go on and on about grad school, while all of his parents’ friends talk about how proud they are of him, all while excitedly questioning him on what he wants to do with his life. That “lost” mentality leads him to finally taking control and doing something crazy, which is sleeping with a married woman.

Turns out that woman is the deranged Mrs. Robinson. Well, maybe I’m being a little harsh, because she’s actually a really fun and interesting character. She manipulates him into an affair because her marriage is basically nonexistent. She’s the most entertaining character, and possibly the most complex. At one point in the story she even divulges what she wanted to do with her life when she was Benjamin’s age. Between the coming-of-age trauma, the sexual maturation, and the comedic love affair, I can certainly understand why this movie was so popular in its time.

For starters, it explores the disconnect between the past generation of babyboomers and up and coming generation that feels kind of lost in a very post-modern world (look at me throwing around terms like babyboomers and post-modern). The film even uses University of Berkeley, practically the epitome of liberal philosophy for the younger generation at the time, as a setting. The reason I found it relatable is because these inter-generational relations tend to repeat themselves. Today’s parents don’t understand what it’s like growing up in a world where your world is divided between social networks, where our future employers can stalk us on Facebook, or where the media interacts with us in ways never dreamed possible. There are so many complexities in the relationship between Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson, and as a viewer I can understand why Benjamin is so often conflicted and flighty in the film. He’s stressing about his future most of the time, as us college students often do, and then the story ties in these complicated relationships with both Mrs. Robinson and her daughter, Elaine. It’s a psychological labyrinth of the complexities of our transition into the adult world!

Anyway, I enjoyed the movie immensely (do I ever not enjoy a movie?), but I also plan to re-watch it when I’m older to see if I side with Mrs. Robinson next time. In addition, I highly recommend this movie for any teenager. In fact, the movie came out the same year as “Bonnie and Clyde,” the peak of teenage movie attendance. That’s when studios realized that there are huge audiences of teenagers waiting to see movies that they can relate to, so you can thank this time period for “Twilight.”

Well… that might be a bit of a stretch…

The Impossible (2012) - Juan Antonia Bayona

This is the trailer for the film “The Impossible” which is in theaters now. I actually just got back from it so I’m writing this while I’m in “the movie mood.” It’s a state of being where you can still feel the emotions that a movie you just saw created in you and you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s probably not a very objective way to write a film review, but here goes.

“The Impossible” is a disaster drama by director Juan Antonio Bayona (2007’s “The Orphanage”). The film was released in Spain in October 2012, but it wasn’t released in the United States until January 4th, 2013. With the Academy Award nominations being announced tomorrow, and my obsession with award show season growing by the minute (it’s actually becoming a problem), I am so excited for this film to do well both commercially and critically.

I had watched the trailer a few times and I was actually really excited for this movie. I think the combination of “true events” and “natural disasters” make for amazing and inspiring movies, except this one doesn’t even need the fake “Rose and Jack” storyline that “Titanic” had. It’s raw in the way “Les Misérables” is, and chilling in the way other disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” are. Basically, the story follows the Bennet family during the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The family vacations in Thailand for Christmas and are very quickly separated by the massive disaster that devastated much of southeast Asia.

Because of my experience with the trailer, I knew the film had very little time to actually introduce the pre-tsunami Bennet family. There’s Maria and Henry, the parents, and sons Lucas, Thomas, and Simon. Henry is some kind of businessman in Japan, and Maria was a doctor before she had her kids and Henry got a job a Japan. The film makes the family clearly British, even though the family the film is about is Spanish. Bayona said that he wanted to make the film as universal as possible by not specifying the nationality of the Bennet family. So the family is British. Who doesn’t love British accents?

Because Taylor Swift and Harry Styles just broke up. Anyway, the story is extremely moving in a much more “in your face” way than Les Miz was. Maria (played by Naomi Watts) and the oldest son, Lucas, find each other early on, and they have to deal with serious injuries as well as the decision to go to a hospital instead of looking for the rest of their family. Meanwhile, Henry (Ewan McGregor) finds his two younger sons, and the three of them struggle with finding help or looking for their loved ones. But their plot is definitely secondary to the moving and powerful tale of the mother and her son. I saw the film with my mom, which was basically the equivalent of a mother and daughter seeing “Brave” together. But also throw in the fact that no teenage boy wants to cry in front of his mom.

The film deals with compassion, familial love, and human nature in a way that is surprisingly accessible to someone who has never dealt with anything near this scale. Along with that, it captures both the mass hysteria and the humanistic companionship that comes with surviving a tragedy like this one. There’s an especially touching scene where Lucas and his mother are wandering through the wreckage, and they hear a boy crying. Lucas argues that they need to get to higher ground, but Maria makes a case for why they have to save him. She posits “what if it were Thomas or Simon?” even though she knows it isn’t. They end up saving him and in the end we see the boy reunited with his family. Meanwhile I’m like

I can’t say it enough. The film is seriously powerful. Naomi Watts certainly deserved her Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama, and I think Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland (who played the oldest son Lucas) deserved one as well. There’s something about the way Tom Holland handles his character that is really moving, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him soon again.

There’s a scene where Ewan McGregor’s character is taken to a shelter after spending all night looking for his wife and son, and he is sitting around a group of survivors telling their stories. A man gives Henry a phone to call his kids’ grandfather, and he tells him that him and his two sons are alright, but that he can’t find his wife and son. He hangs up because he breaks down, and the group forces him to call the grandfather back (at a time where cellphone battery is more valuable than everyone’s material possessions combined) to tell them that he will keep looking for his loved ones. It’s emotional and heartbreaking and there wasn’t a person in the theater not sniffling.

I have to give the award for “most heartbreaking scene” to when Maria first emerges from the water. It takes her a moment to realize what has happened, and she then breaks down. The full force of the water rushing past her is nothing compared to the thought of her having lost her family. She cries out and every audience member understood what it was like to be confronted with being truly alone in such a devastating way. 

I highly recommend that anyone with a functioning heart goes to see this film. I know that awards season consists of the meteor shower of intense emotional films, where comedies are few and far between, but this movie is truly inspiring. I’ll admit it, by the end I looked like this.