Thoughts on The Swimmer

   On Criterion, I watched The Swimmer, a 1968 drama written and directed by Eleanor and Frank Perry, based on John Cheever's short story of the same name. The film starred Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill, a middle-aged, fit, and wealthy advertising executive who lives in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, and he drops by a pool party held by old friends, wearing only a bathing suit, and having drinks with them. He's popular, with many rich friends, and skates through life, repeatedly referring to his daughters "playing tennis at home." He looks over the hilly area where his home is further south, and connects a "river" of swimming pools at his friends' homes that lead to his home, and decides he is going to swim his way home, walking barefoot in his bathing suit and taking swims in each pool. His friends think his plan is amusing, though they are also nursing hangovers from a party the night before, so they may not be thinking clearly.

    So Ned sets on his way, walking through the woods and dropping up unexpectedly at his friends' homes, and as he makes his odyssey home, the people he meets with are from his past, and reveal more about his character as being a shallow, cheap, snobby person. He sees Julie (Janet Landgard), a former babysitter who watched his kids, who is now a young woman of 20, and confesses that she had a crush on him as a teen, only for her crush to become more disillusioned when she briefly joins him on his journey. He stops by friends who are a nudist couple, who aren't bothered by his eccentricities but are put off by his posturing. He is condescending to the hired driver (Bernie Hamilton) of one of his friends, asking about where the previous driver Steve is, who the new driver doesn't know, and being oblivious to the new driver being put off by his classist attitude towards "the help."

    As his path home becomes increasingly grim, the film becomes more of an allegory about Ned living in a fantasy, refusing to accept realities of his true character or how people really see him, and Lancaster is excellent in starting off as a broad-chested, handsome man and becoming a broken shell of a person with his whole life shattered, having a psychotic break with reality. 

    This film was excellent, feeling like a horror film without being classified as one, because it's about an entitled upper-class man having a crisis where, beyond his sunny demeanor, all of his ugliness comes to light, and especially pointed out by people he's hurt and stepped on (especially in an excellent scene with Janice Rule as his former mistress), until he looks like a loser standing in the rain in just his bathing suit, a complex performance of vulnerability by a symbol of machismo like Burt Lancaster, known for noir films and tough guy roles.

    I had heard of this film from the podcast Critically Acclaimed Network, where the hosts were each giving their top ten list of the best 24-hour movies in an episode from last year, and thought it sounded really interesting, and I'm glad I watched it, it was a great movie.