• The Swimmer

11/6/21 (Sat)

Frank Perry’s hallucinatory 1968 diary of a mad has-been. The main character’s precarious mental state is reflected in the odd structure of the film and some bizarre editing. While inevitably a product of its time – not sure if the white, Waspy, nouveau riche setting would be possible today, whether true to the era or not, not to mention a passing reference to “stylish fags” – its unconventional setup has evidently given it a cult following.

After an ominous opening where an unknown presence appears to be wandering through some woods, the handsome and virile Ned (Burt Lancaster), dressed in a swimsuit, emerges at a pool and jumps in. When he comes up after a lap, we find that he is at the home of old friends, who are still hung over from the previous day’s pool party. We gather that Ned is part of the successful rising class in this chic neighborhood, such as his references to his family and tennis court. He seems to fit in with his breezy confidence and relentless smile. During the affable conversation, he realizes that the swimming pools at the neighborhood homes make a virtual beeline to his house. He resolves to swim the eight miles back home, walking from pool to pool.

That starts a strange journey in which some ugly truths emerge bit by bit with each house he visits. We come to realize that he is not the high-minded Gatsby he thinks he is. But he strangely seems to have no recollection of all that has happened in the past two years. We get only hints that gradually come together. In addition to curious looks when he mentions his wife or other details (no one seems to wonder about his sudden appearance in a swimsuit), his neighbors have various reactions to seeing him suddenly appear in their yards: several greet him with empty social niceties, one throws him out for deserting her son when the kid was desperately sick (or possibly dying), another offers a potential job opportunity, another refuses to return Ned’s property after picking it up at auction, all suggesting that his status has fallen. His previous snobbishness is alluded to in other ways: a black chauffeur who clearly knows him well is miffed when Ned mistakes him for someone else; an old lover, an actress, lays into him for unceremoniously dumping her; other poorer neighbors bash him for his nasty kids (apparently involved in a drunk car accident that Ned paid their way out of), his failure to pay back his debts, and his arrogance (seeing him at a public pool: “Whatsa matter, Mr Merrill, your friends’ pool run outta water?”).

He doesn’t seem to accept his obsolescence: he tries to outrun a horse in a field as surreal proof of his virility, and jumps over a crossbar to impress a young woman (spraining his ankle in process, which apparently actually happened to Lancaster on the set). He becomes a little too desperate to win the confidence of – or maybe seduce – the woman, prompting her to run away in yet another of his increased failures.

As he goes from house to house, his confidence and toothy smile turn grim, and he starts to shiver from the cold, virtually aging before us. The last pool before his house is a public facility, where he is humiliated by the staff and berated by poorer neighbors that he evidently used to scorn, even as he continues to greet them in his delirium as friends. When he finally reaches his home, he finds the property, the tennis courts, the interior all in ruins – events were a crazed nightmare inside his head. His primal scream at the realization of his destroyed dreams was reminiscent of the ending of Planet of the Apes.

The best scene is an exchange between Ned and his old flame Shirley (a terrific Janice Rule), which was actually directed by Sydney Pollack. It’s more straightforward than the other dream-like sequences, making the theme clearer. Their confrontation reveals what has been hinted at, that Ned had it all at one point – good job, rich wife, beautiful home with pool and tennis court, social status (along with a disdain for the lower classes) – but lost it for an unknown reason and has essentially gone mad. Ned’s confusion becomes clearer here; he doesn’t understand or recall what he’s done to Shirley and confuses details, such as thinking that she’s been to his house at some point and mentioning that his long-gone wife and daughters are waiting for him at home. He doesn’t understand why she’s treating him so coolly. She tells of her despair in seeing him long ago with his family at the ballet just an hour after she was sleeping with him (“I put that smile on your face, you damned hypocrite!”), but he doesn’t seem to get it at all. He does his best to seduce her anew, but in the end she throws him out, telling him caustically that she never really loved him and was only acting all along. Two great performances superbly staged. The disjointed super-close-up of Ned’s eyes was presumably Perry’s touch, but it works in context. A different actress was supposedly filmed at one point before being replaced, but it’s hard to visualize anyone but Rule after seeing this. The long list of quotes on the IMDb page are nearly all from this single scene.

Other actors and scenes were also apparently replaced by the producers and reworked by Pollack, and I imagine that he was responsible for the more coherent moments. Lancaster, whose support was crucial in getting this strange movie produced, reportedly put up the money for re-filming. It flopped on its initial release, but has become something of a cult film since.

Lancaster is amazingly fit for a man in his 50s, interesting given his portrayal five years earlier of a fading old nobleman in The Leopard. He appears the entire time in nothing but a swimsuit (or less – he even removes that for a scene at a nudist family’s home), maybe borrowed from the beach scene in From Here to Eternity. As noted, he practically ages before our eyes over the course of the film. It is an impressive performance.

Also memorable was the big party where the guests are wolfing down huge mounds of caviar, including a nice scene where a young Joan Rivers, impressed with Ned at first, ultimately sees through him (he retorts in seeming seriousness that he is “noble and splendid”). Elsewhere, he “swims” with a boy in an empty pool, saying, “If you make believe hard enough that something’s true, then it is true for you” – a symbol of his own tenuous grasp on reality. (He fortunately lapses briefly back into the real world when the boy starts to leap from the diving board onto the concrete floor.)

This cryptic portrayal of a merciless descent into madness adeptly gives out only enough information as needed, if that, at any given moment. The stripping away of the man’s fantasies, turning him into a male Blanche Dubois, has been interpreted as an allegory for American aspirations of class, but I’m happy to see it as a slow-drip decline of an individual. An original and disturbing film.