The Swimmer

Time has not been kind to Frank Perry's The Swimmer (1968).  The film is based on a famous story by John Cheever, high-concept literature that is, in fact, simply a situation and not a narrative:  an aging womanizer in Connecticut devises the idea of swimming cross-country to his home -- the idea is that he will "portage" (hike) between expensive houses of neighbors and friends, swim across their pools, and continue in this way until he reaches his home.  Pretty quickly, it's established that the swimmer has lost his home and family -- his quest is quixotic because he has no home to which to return.  Along the way, the swimmer encounters various former mistresses and girlfriends.  He seems to have cut a wide swath through the rich wives in the suburbs where he once lived.  At first, his adventure seems benign and the film develops it's action as a sort of pastoral.  However, as the quest continues, people becomes increasingly hostile, the hero seems injured and hypothermic, and, after some severe humiliations, it's implied that he perishes on the front steps of the decrepit and locked house where he once lived.  At the time that the movie was released, the picture relied upon star-power (Burt Lancaster plays the swimmer) to engage our sympathy for the titular character.  But Lancaster, playing a man named Neddie Merrill, although beautiful, isn't admirable in any way -- in fact, he seems to be an inveterate sexual harasser:  we see him sneak up on women and grab them from behind, slap their asses, and, generally, although ineffectually try to seduce everyone that he encounters -- he even gropes a girl thirty years younger than him:  she was once his baby sitter when he was married to Lucinda (we never see her) and living with his wife and two daughters.  (The girl, after a cloying interlude of affection, finally figures out that Neddie is creepy and runs away from him in horror.)  In 1968, Neddie's boorish behavior would have been seen by many (although not all) as evidence of his manly vigor -- thus, there would have been a modicum of sympathy for his bad conduct.  Today, we don't give harassers like this the benefit of the doubt and, so, the fundamental emotional effect that the movie seeks to induce -- catharsis on the basis of the swimmer's tragedy won't be available to most viewers, notwithstanding Lancaster's physical and sexual appeal.  It's like Death of a Salesman if we were culturally attuned to deeply dislike Willie Loman -- the movie doesn't work emotionally because what happens to Lancaster seems mild in our less kindly, and more ideologically fraught, era:  no one is handcuffing Lancaster and hauling him, like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, off to jail.

The film seems intended as a sort of allegory of lost, or diminishing, masculine vigor.  Implicit is the contention that no one would have rejected Neddie's overtures when he was at the height of his power and influence.  The film is a weird combination of realistically intended (although often implausible) characters and situations and an allegorical schemata -- the picture begins in media res, with Lancaster emerging out of a sort of forest primeval, looking sharp in his little black bathing trunks but, otherwise, naked and barefoot.  (He does a lot of walking and running in the film and I winced many times for his poor bare feet.)  We are never told why this Natty Bumppo is wandering the wilds of Connecticut mostly naked -- this is the situation we are given.  Neddie happens upon a mansion with a pool where he knows the people in the house, rich White folks who are getting casually drunk poolside.  He swims the pool, flirts with the women, and, then, devises the idea to swim what he calls the "river of Lucinda" (named after his wife) to his home on the other side of the county.  He can accomplish this by traversing about a dozen pools that will lead to his home (where paradoxically there is no pool but instead tennis courts).  He describes his quest in poetic, and imaginary, terms -- "a river of sapphire pools" that will lead him home.  Alone among the rich people, Neddie seems to have a poetic sensibility.  Several times, he makes this toast:  "Here's to sugar on the strawberries!".  The women, of course, respond to the beautiful and athletic man with scarcely concealed lust -- the husbands, however, have disdain for whatever kind of failure has afflicted him.  For about ninety minutes, Neddie goes from pool to pool, crossing an idyllic landscape that seems to have no roads, no streets, no shopping districts or intersections or businesses of any kind -- just huge estates in lush green meadows with big swimming pools.  The most interesting part of the film is the first forty-five minutes in which Perry seems to be attempting some kind of variant on the most ancient, and diminished in modern times, artistic form -- the pastoral idyll.  He meets various women who seem interested in him, cavorts with a maiden thirty years younger than him, and, even, encouters a lonely boy playing a flute or some sort of wind instrument -- it's a version of Theocritus.  Toward the end of the film, the pastoral idyll drops away and we encounter with the Swimmer a crowded highway and, a public municipal poo filled with middle-class people who humiliate Neddie in a painful way.  At least, he climbs a weird cliff to his house on the hill, a place that seems long abandoned,.  As they say, "you can go home any more."  The nice weather (it seems to be a very hot day in late August) has turned ugly and there's a thunderstorm (not very effectively depicted).  Neddie, who has become increasingly disoriented, seems injured and feverish.  The ending is set up as the climax of an Antonioni film -- the camera dollies toward a broken window in the house and we expect a macabre tour of the ruined, empty structure (lots of empty frames like the end of L'Eclisse).  But Perry doesn't know how to manage this -- he's a very clumsy film-maker and the camera just shows us what we expected all along:  there's no one home at the Swimmer's house.  

The film is a virtual museum of late sixties cliches.  There's a sappy score by Marvin Hamlisch, amplified into all sorts of swooning orchestral interludes.  The camera shows innumerable sun-flares and, when Lancaster plunges into the water, drops are strewn all over the lens.  There are interminable slow-motion interludes that are supposed to be lyrical but are just idiotic and annoying.  When things get agitated, the camera trembles in hand -- that is, there are many hand-held sequences. Sometimes, flashbacks are signified by enormous close-ups of Lancaster's steely blue eye -- but the flashbacks are completely uncommunicative, just more lens-flare, slo-mo, and images of noble horses or flowers.  The film's appeal lies entirely in Lancaster's dogged performance which isn't bad in my view -- the actor is simply dealt an impossible hand.  Lancaster's athleticism here is precisely calibrated and he shows with this body how the character goes from proud and strong to weak, dejected, and ultimately doomed -- it's a tour de force of physical acting.  Despite Lancaster's tremendous beauty -- sometimes, with his hair slicked he resembles one of Donatello's warriors -- the enterprise is pretty much doomed.