The Swimmer (1968)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

("Loses" a star for being, in some ways, a little dated, in terms purely of production).It's a lucid dream/nightmare, it's a metaphor, it's a reckoning, it's an enigma.It's all these things. It's also a nice reminder that the willingness to craft a nut perhaps too tough to crack wasn't beyond a Hollywood system famously too eager to put butts in the seats.In some ways, this is a dangerous film--it teeters on the edge of being an apologetic for the unforgivable.But... it also plies a plausible deniability... as its images ultimately seem thrown over the wall from the subconscious. Or... is it the Jungian collective unconscious? If the latter, then... it's your baby. Deal with it.You owe it to yourself to let it screen in your conscious mind. For your delectation (at least).Check it out.

I liked that Burt Lancaster called The Swimmer, about a man who decides to "swim to home" across the relatively quiet upper-middle class suburbia by taking a swim in each of his neighbors swimming pools (and one rec center), "Death of a Salesman in swim trunks." I can still see the connections with the disillusionment of, and a critique by others, of the American (white) middle-class male in the promise of having it "all", but having the connection to Willy Loman and the story of falling so completely from grace and promise (and failing himself repeatedly) marks this as something special in American cinema at the time. And Burt Lancaster, in his 50's by the time he made this, is fit for the part (in more ways than one) and really gets into how this man is so happy to be doing this "adventure" as he calls it, like he's some sort of explorer. But what is he exploring? Actual places, or people's hearts and minds? A lot of this can be (or should be, or both) read as an allegory, or some kind of surrealistic dive (no pun intended) into the well-off. These people have such lavish homes and places, none of them have to worry about being without (though a little boy may be taught to value his money early on with a lemonade stand), and of course their pools and/or tennis courts. So with a story like this, adapted from a short piece of prose by John Cheever, the plot isn't really of significance. Although, to that point, it is fascinating for me in watching this how it feels like he *must* swim at each of the places he stops at, even if it's only for several seconds. And at one point when he discovers one pool that's been drained of water - the lemonade entrepreneur can't swim - he mock-swims it. Not great, but close enough.So with this extremely basic through-line we get what is more closely related to European cinema of the period: it's a mood piece, all about expressing how this man goes across the spectrum. He is jubilant, happy, accomplished, serious, focused-determined, downtrodden, sad, angry, kind of crazy, bewildered (watch out for those cars in that heavily edited walking-across-a-highway sequence!) and melancholy. The conflicts of the movie come from whether or not those he comes across will be good to him or not; it seems like, for the most part, everyone at least has some familiarity with him and at most they've even had relationships - in one woman's case, Shirley (a fantastic ten minutes for Janice Role), a former lover... on the side, as it were.If it has any closer relation than Death of a Salesman, which may have been what was most comparable at the time for Lancaster, it's Mad Men: I could have see Don in a sort of dream episode like this, where everything from masculinity to ethical codes to psychology and how men treat women and objects and possessions comes into question. And Lancaster is the one here going through these emotions, to plumb the depths to get at what this man may be all about, to excellent effect. There are moments it feels like he could become, well, affected in his delivery but it doesn't happen; he's a passionate person and comes off as such in whatever he's talking about (and it may even come close to being uneasy, like a walk and talk with a much younger woman, an ex "babysitter"). If Lancaster doesn't work than neither does the movie, in large part. I'm glad he gets to deliver here and it's certainly one of his three or four major pieces of acting in a career full of wonderful roles.If I don't quite love the movie as much as some out there - a flop on release initially it's gained a following over time (youtube Gilbert Gottfried and TCM, of all people, to see a good talk about the film) - it may be because certain little things make it awkwardly dated. When Ned is walking through the woods to go from place to place it's shot and edited to be fairly dream-like and hallucinatory, which may be fine thematically, but in how it looks today it's stuck in that 60's way of messing with lenses and filters and shots far off with actors speaking ADR that doesn't totally work for me. And there's a short scene at one of the houses where a young Joan Rivers pops up and it feels misdirected (and according to her she was).These small misgivings aside, it is a film that is lucky to get its audience over the years. It's at times strange and borderline, darkly, comical, and then by the last half hour as things get grimmer and more oppressive (and that last several minutes when he does get 'home'), it has the feeling of some fable that's gone into the realm of tragedy. We may not understand fully what Ned's gone home to, but there's some intuition that failure is at the heart of it. And maybe the river will flow for someone else some other time...

I've always thought that the 1960s overall wasn't a great decade in film, although ironically the film that I think to be the best film of all time, 2001:A space Odyssey, came in the 60s and in the same year of this film, THE SWIMMER (1968), that I'm reviewing. "The Swimmer", a hidden gem of a masterpiece starring one of the most iconic star-actors in all of film history, the great Burt Lancaster, features arguably his greatest accomplishment as an actor. Probably no surprise that Lancaster didn't garner a Best Actor nod for this as it's an extremely surreal, odd, unsettling film experience that doesn't shout for awards.Lancaster brilliantly essays the complex role of Ned Merrill, an athletic, successful family man, who through the course of the film, taking place on a summer day in a sizable suburban Connecticut community, swims from pool to pool of different neighbors trying to make his way home to his wife and 2 daughters. The boastful, middle-aged Ned begins the film talking of his "perfect" life, great job, loving family, but as the film progresses, layers of both Ned's character and personal life get methodically revealed that shed away his confident demeanor piece by piece.Along his journey, Ned runs into his neighbors who, through stimulating and involving conversations, each helps to piece together the puzzle of Ned's life while revealing their own true natures. Ned slowly sees the hypocrisy and phoniness in the middle-class world he's been living in and that he has no real friends that he can count on when the chips are down. Ned becomes more disoriented and confused as he progressively gets treated with more vitriol and contempt from people in the community as the day wanes on. By the time Ned finds his way home, a devastating revelation lays in wait for both Ned and the viewer.What makes "The Swimmer" so challenging is that it can be interpreted as either 1) a literal happening of Ned swimming across the community and running into old "friends", OR 2) an allegory of the trajectory of the downfall of Ned's life, told in surrealistic fashion using the pool journey as the storyteller. A third interpretation is that it could simply be the thoughts of Ned in his dying moments, his life flashing before his eyes close for the last time. I love movies like this with both ambiguity AND depth of character! Burt Lancaster's pitch perfect performance, along with the beautiful photography and setting and surreal atmosphere, makes the film one of the most interesting pieces of cinema in both the 1960s as well as in film history!

At the beginning of The Swimmer, we see a man climb up a rocky hill, duck beneath the trees, trot across a lawn and dive into a beautiful swimming pool. He does a few laps, is handed a drink and is welcomed by acquaintances from years past. We know nothing about this man, not where he came from nor who he is (other than the fact that he's Burt Lancaster and that he's in amazing shape). Everything seems ideal; the sun and sky, the green grass and trees. It's a perfect day for an 'explorer' to create a day-long adventure from this pool back to his own home across the county. Ned's journey is not as grand as Candide or Huck Finn or Gulliver. No, his is a simple plan - he will swim from pool to pool across the valley until he's back home, where his wife is waiting and his girls are playing tennis. It seems like the ambition of a simple-minded dreamer, yet by the end of the first Act, the viewer knows that something is wrong. We learn about Ned's life at every stop in his journey. The clues come as quickly as a muttered word and leave as fast as a furrowed brow. Ned makes a lot of promises he won't keep and struggles to keep his facts straight from one pool to the next. His memories are blurry and the path soon forces cracks in the armor of the make-believe world he seems to live within. The Swimmer reminded me of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? yet doesn't tie together the pieces as neatly as did that Mike Nichols' masterpiece. The Swimmer, in fact, answers almost no questions by the time it has concluded, yet inspires the viewer to wonder what was actually real in the preceding 95 minutes. Lancaster, whom I loved in Elmer Gantry, was never better than in this film. He is in every scene of the picture and carries it well. Don't be fooled by the two-minute trailer that looks like something Austin Powers would have found groovy back in 1968. This is a serious film and a thoroughly engaging one; the type that no studio would touch in 2015. Although if they did, I'd pay to see Robert Downey, Jr. reprise this character. Definitely worth a look!