Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

The Swimmer. Why on earth did I choose to see this movie? I rarely see anything made before, say, 1980, unless I have very good reason. Not that I haven’t greatly enjoyed many movies made before that time, but I don’t actively seek them out. So why this one? One very simple reason – Burt Lancaster. After watching him play a big part in turning the ordinary into the magical in Field of Dreams, it seemed a good idea to see more of the man’s work. He’s made about a hundred movies, but for some reason, I got the notion of The Swimmer (1968) stuck in my craw. The movie was immensely difficult to find on VHS, but, lo and behold, was just this month released on DVD. So, after waiting for literally years, I finally got to see The Swimmer.

The short and sweet of it is I’m glad I didn’t forget about this one. I’m terrifically glad to have seen it, for both the story it tells, and the sociological intrigue of the film when viewed through a 2003 eye. The main plot line is this – Neddy Merrill is swimming home. But that’s sort of like saying the main plot line in Ghandi is that the guy is bald. There is just so much more to it. Both within the plot itself, and within the message it conveys.

The movie opens with Neddy (Lancaster) showing up at the house of some friends in his swimming suit (a lovely 1968 version of the Speedo), in bare feet, carrying a towel. He is greeted with great joviality by his friends, who are bemoaning their hangovers while mixing drinks. They treat him like a long lost friend, exclaiming over how long it’s been since they’ve seen him, and how good he looks, but without once mentioning where he’s been. None of them seem to find anything at all odd about a man they haven’t seen in years showing up unannounced, on foot, in a swimming suit. They simply give him a drink and chatter away like it was any other day in their decadent and useless lives. As Neddy half listens to their conversation, he hears them mention that someone has put in a new back yard swimming pool. Neddy snaps to attention, gets the details, then his eyes glass over and he begins to soliloquize. It seems he has had a revelation. With the introduction of this new pool, he can now go from house to house, all the way across the county, swimming in each pool as he goes, and swim home to his house on the hill, where his wife and adult daughters await him. His friends laugh at his flight of fancy, never stopping to realize that he is quite serious. Neddy abandons his towel and, after a quick, powerful lap in the pool, is off on his journey.

He does indeed go from house to house, swimming uninvited in various pools, greeted with various reactions. Some places welcome him like a long lost comrade. Others shun him as a pariah. At one house he meets the now grown girl who used to baby-sit his daughters. After a lapse in which he attempts to hire her, he convinces her to join him on his quest, and she does accompany with him for a while. As he journeys from here to there, we get bits and pieces of clues that all is not right with our man Ned. The past couple of years have apparently been terribly unkind to our boy. Through vague references and oblique treatment we begin to understand that the world as he sees it ended some time ago. He is not really aware of either his circumstance or his surroundings. His friends and acquaintances are aware of his past, yet fail to bring it up directly, alluding to it or avoiding him instead. So the film plays out with Ned continuing his journey, slowly decompensating and becoming weaker and weaker as he goes.

Lancaster is remarkable in the role of Ned. He is the only major player in the film. He carries the entire weight. There are other minor players, including brief appearances by Joan Rivers and Diana Muldaur, as well as Janet Landgard in a wooden performance as Julie the babysitter. But this movie belongs to Lancaster. That voice, with the same mellifluous, hypnotizing ability it would still have twenty years later, carries a punch that few can equal. He conveys, through sheer tone, conviction, whimsy, confusion and anger. He manages to portray Ned’s wildly changing moods and perceptions, as well as his denial and confusion, seamlessly. He lets us see Ned bluff, hallucinate and decompensate before our eyes. He also manages to portray, physically, the strength of Ned in the beginning, and how he revels in it. This same ability to use his body to convey emotion is more potent still as that strength begins to wane. In the John Cheever story on which the film is based, Ned is described as “a slender man – he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth – and while he was far from young…………” Lancaster fits this description to a T. A fantastic performance.

The Swimmer was adapted for the screen by Eleanor Perry, and directed by Frank Perry. While the movie itself is somewhat dated, the underlying themes in this tale are as powerful today as they undoubtedly were in 1968. As Ned swims across suburbia, we are treated to a wide range of personalities, all having their own histories with Ned, and all with one thing in common. Despite his obviously bleak recent history, none of these people can see past their own vision of him in his former life enough to even begin to question his current state of being. His friends want only to have things back as they were, even if they have to pretend to make that happen, and his enemies still hold years old grudges that allow them to see only their anger at who Ned was. None of them bother to really look at the man falling apart in front of them. The shallowness and excess of late 1960’s suburbia is on show for all to see. Every one of these people is so busy leading their perfect lives of make believe that they can’t, even for a minute, look below the surface and see that Ned is drowning. It is a poignant and powerful statement on the superficiality of relationships.

The photography by David L. Quaid and the score by Marvin Hamlisch are timely accents to the picture. The photography is full of bright color, slow motion (including one very hokey and dated sequence) and blurred shots indicating Ned’s less than whole state. The score is, I would say, one part Sound of Music, one part Charlie’s Angels and one part Love Boat. It sounds a lot like the opulent orchestral scores of the 50's and early 60's, but with a hint of the synthesizers and pseudo-muzac to come in the 1970’s. It’s absolutely perfect for this movie that takes place in a world where the fifties are receding into the background, the sixties are valiantly trying to happen and the seventies are just around the corner.

A bit of sociological perspective

The Swimmer was, as noted, made in 1968. While watching the movie with my 2003 eye, which is quite accustomed to more current fare, some things struck me as having radically changed in the intervening years. The first thing I noticed is that though Lancaster spends the entire movie in his swimming suit, he is neither particularly young (55 at the time the movie was released) nor is he buff beyond belief. He is in excellent shape, but he also looks like an actual man. No super muscles, no chest wax, and some definite jiggle during a long slow motion scene. This in no way diminishes either his presence or his appeal, but I can’t imagine it happening today. Rare is the circumstance where we see anyone over 30 reveling in their own physical strength, never mind doing it half clothed for an entire movie. We’ve become so accustomed to celluloid perfection that is not even within the realm of human possibility that it is a breath of fresh air to see a man on screen looking like an actual man.

Also of note is that the character of Ned, in at least one instance, behaves in a way that would be considered today completely sexually inappropriate. Yet here it is not portrayed as such. His quite insistent sexual advances are rebuffed, but not without effort and at least some emotional trauma. I suspect that a 1968 audience did not see Ned as an attempted rapist, but from a more contemporary standpoint, few protagonists would behave in this fashion and remain sympathetic to the audience.

Finally we have Ned’s mental state. Watching the movie, we aren’t really given much of an explanation for his confusion, or for what happened to throw his life into such disarray. It is the portrait of the disintegration of a man, without a lot of detail to support it. Hollywood has tended, over the last few decades, to leave less and less to the imagination. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not. As a 2003 viewer, I wish we could have known a bit more about Ned. But from a 1968 perspective, I suspect that would have diluted the underlying message and taken away the need for the audience to think for themselves.

Regardless of how closely the movie may come to portraying the story upon which it is based (and, not having actually read the entire story, I don’t really know), I suspect that a 2003 version of the same man in the same circumstances would be radically different. One of the things that makes dissecting The Swimmer fun is to imagine what present day Hollywood would do to this story.

Overall, The Swimmer is a shining performance by a youthful (if not young) Burt Lancaster, beautifully portraying the emotional decline and fall of a single man on a single day. Newly available on DVD, the print is gorgeous. With its scathing indictment of a shallow society, this one is a keeper. I highly recommend it.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD