The Swimmer
Frank Perry, Sydney Pollack
USA – 1968
Screenplay: Eleanor Perry
Cinematography: David L. Quaid
Production: Columbia Pictures Corporation, Horizon Pictures, Dover Productions
Language: English
Duration: 95 min
Color: Color
Synopsis: One summer day in an upper class neighbourhood of suburban New York City, a middle aged Ned Merrill appears in the back yard of one of his acquaintances. A former stock broker who had suffered a mental breakdown, he remains wholly delusional about his current situation. As an eccentric feat of athletic performance, Ned is determined to swim every pool through the valley between here and his home, along several miles of what he calls Lucinda’s River, after his wife. At each pool, Ned stops and chats with his neighbors, and each stop reveals more of Ned’s past. While his body is fit and full of energy, his infirm mind has constructed a series of explanations for his bizarre obsession: he is not driving because he is on a swimming marathon; his wife and daughters are not with him because they are playing tennis. As he draws closer to his final destination, those who know him better begin to put him down: an alcoholic, a nutjob, a cheating husband and absentee father. When he finally reaches his dilapidated estate—sold months ago—the Swimmer begins to shiver from hypothermia as rain sets in.
Notes:
The Swimmer belongs to a wave films from the late sixties contending the emotional superficiality and crass materialism of American suburban middle classes. The film’s emphasis on Ned’s “performance” of a role (the family patriarch) he has in reality failed to play, reflects the story’s preoccupation with status anxiety, which conflicted with the myth of “classlessness” promulgated by the media in the postwar years. Ned’s madness is an extreme form of the allegiance to pretense typical of the culture in which he lives. The Swimmer explicitly acknowledges that Ned displays his body as a status symbol, a conception of masculinity the film treats as yet another symptom of the obsession with artifice, both contradictory (it arouses social envy, but results in the sleaze and adultery which threaten the integrity of the “decent” household) and inappropriate as a vehicle for self-definition, as the ageing body will inevitably deteriorate.
After an antagonistic encounter with a former mistress, Ned is left freezing cold, shivering and isolated in the pool. He raises his fists at the sky in anger, tensing his body, then collapses under the strain of the effort. A shot tracks him at close range whilst, holding his aching waist with one hand, he pitifully paddles with the other. Such scenes align the film with a Naturalist tradition, which seemed to be re-emerging in late sixties’ American cinema. Developed as an artistic form in the late nineteenth century, Naturalism implies an impulse to objectivity, a tendency to emphasize observation or description over narrative. Crucial to Naturalism is the suspension of the desire to ascribe meaning, which reflects its desire to treat humanity, quasi-scientifically, as subject matter. The essential meaninglessness of physical matter informs the focus of Naturalist description on the complex disorder of life: its mess, and potential for disintegration. Such as Naturalist narratives exist, they tend to take the form of trajectories of physical and moral decay. These themes continue to be relevant to seventies’ cinema: the films of John Cassavetes or Martin Scorsese, for example, are routinely, if often uncritically, designated “naturalistic.”
Excerpt adapted from Brown, Christopher R. “Mad about the Boy? Hollywood Stardom and Masculinity Subverted in The Swimmer.” Quarterly Review Of Film And Video 29, no. 4 (August 2012): 356-364.