Over a year ago I wrote about Last Summer, a coming-of-age nightmare from once husband and wife duo Frank and Eleanor Perry. It’s one of the more sinister films I’ve seen, and I had no idea it came out just a year after The Swimmer, which isn’t exactly a palette cleanser.
It’s been a minute since I revisited The Swimmer, an adaptation of the famed Cheever short that’s as Cheeveresque as it gets. And while I feel like everything about it that can be said has already been said, I felt inclined to go on about it anyway. In part because in 2017 I wrote a book about American suburbia, and I only wish I had known of the movie then. I only wish I had written that nothing boasts of rottenness more than a pool in which you are unable to see anything but your own reflection.
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Burt Lancaster was entering his mid 50s when he made the movie, but he still looks like a movie star. His body is tight, his face still youthful, and his physical presence suggests a man at his prime. A man who has made something for himself. And by all means the movie opens with this impression, as his Ned completes lap after lap in his friends’s pool. He only surfaces to show off his form to these friends, all hungover and deferential. If there's any hint at something sinister, it’s that he’s erratic: he soon announces to the group that he plans on embarking on an Odyssey back home, swimming through each of his neighbors’s pools to get there.
On his hero’s quest, he encounters friends, the now-older babysitter of his two daughters, people he had shunned, a lonely boy, his mistress, and along the way the Perrys hint at something not quite right. Ned is blind to his troubles, and visits each guest which a deranged optimism, one we immediately sense is false. It’s also in the weather, which unsubtly shifts from a perfect summer day into a stormier autumn. And then there are the implications. Troubled daughters. Money owed. A snooty wife who no longer wants him. Eventually he’s thrust out of a Sirkian facade into an unforgiving reality.
Yet, The Swimmer avoids being a cautionary cliché. It doesn’t suggest that if Ned behaved any better before his luck came to an end, that he would be so ostracized, so broken. Instead it focuses on the truths about his upper class Connecticut life. It’s unforgiving. Everyone demands you fall in line. His friends are as likely to fall at some point or other (I couldn’t help but think of the silhouetted man in Mad Men opener). They all have these pools—symbols of their upward mobility—they look into and only see themselves how they want to see themselves.
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The Swimmer gave me the idea for an insane triple feature. You screen the Frank and Eleanor Perry films of 1968, 1969, 1970 in succession. The Swimmer, Last Summer, and Diary of a Man Housewife. Then you take a couple of days off and you watch Mommie Dearest and wonder, as they seem to again and again, where do we get off on being so fucking rotten.