The first
time I saw the ending, I was young and naïve. My mind was addled by seeing
homage’s of it in The Simpsons and Wayne’s World. I first viewed it as a heroic
ending. The Boy got the Girl, the antagonists were vanquished, if only for a
little while. I never really watched their faces. Nor did I grasp what the shot
was trying to say. To me, it was all so very… safe.
It was only
during a re-watch with my girlfriend, that my ignorance slapped me in the face.
The foolhardiness of the Benjamin’s “plan”. The fact that there is no plan at
all. Their faces not only show their youth, but just how lost they are at such
a tentative and esoteric point at their life. I saw echoes of Mrs Robinson and
her reasoning behind what she was trying to do despite her methods. In their
faces I noticed their realisation. There’s beauty fading in that take, and
they’re only just finding out. The moment is bittersweet. Their decision may
leave them as jaded as those they’ve just left. The film’s title becomes a
cruel joke. The Graduate? Of what? Certainly not Life. He has a lot to learn.
When a
filmmaker can crystallise all the fear, worry, jaded and misguidedness of youth, his characters feel throughout the narrative, compile it into one moment and
make this captured malaise seem so universal and iconic, it is then that we
have a real storyteller. R.I.P Mike Nichols.
