The Swimmer - Dive In

[00:00:00][music] >> Hello, my name is Tony. I'm just going to dive in. It's a blazing hot day in the semi-rural suburban Connecticut countryside, an area sparsely populated with the elaborate and affluent 1960s domiciles of city commuters and the idle rich. They come complete with expansive outdoor space for entertaining and swimming pools. A barefoot man confidently emerges from the foliage wearing nothing but a pair of bathing trunks. He is advertising executive Ned Merrill, Burt Lancaster, and he's turned up unannounced at the home of his friends Don and Helen Westerhazy, Tony Bickley and Diana VanderVlis. Thus begins The Swimmer. Ned dives into their pool and swims a length. The Westerhazys and their chums are pleased to see him, although a little puzzled. They haven't been in contact for a while, out of touch. Although they don't seem to mind him crashing their gaff. In conversation, Ned doesn't reveal anything other than his wife Lucinda and his two daughters are at home, where he's headed to right now. The daughters are playing tennis and everything is fine and dandy. How did he get there wearing nothing but a pair of 60s budgie smugglers? No one thinks to ask or feels it out of the ordinary. They're all nursing hangovers from the night before, the wages of middle-class party culture.

[00:01:30]Ned decides he's going to travel across the county and swim the pools of all his friends and acquaintances on the way, as though swimming an imaginary river to get home, the Lucinda River, as he christens it after his beloved wife. And so his odyssey begins, an episodic journey wherein every stop and each pool swim brings him closer to his goal, but also engenders confusing, perplexing encounters with others and revelations of an increasingly dark and disturbing nature until the destination of the final shattering conclusion is arrived at. The Swimmer is one of America's most beautifully shot, unnervingly bleak, and resolutely haunting movies. One of the very best of all time. It may have divided critics and audiences alike, engaging and stimulating some whilst alienating others. Whatever you think, however you react, wherever you stand, you can be sure of one thing. You won't forget it. And if you do, bad news is either Alzheimer's or you're dead. There are distant echoes of Serling's The Twilight Zone vibrating in its DNA, faint notes of The Outer Limits. At times, savage, jet-black flourishes of intense social satire and countercultural musings flash by. But to understand something of what The Swimmer is, to get an elusive handle on it, it's perhaps important to first establish what it is not. It is not a horror story in a conventional sense, although it has enough creeping disquiet and tension- inducing moments going on. It runs on a sort of time travel thematic, with a character who is temporally displaced and whose take on reality is gradually exposed as being inconsistent with that of everyone else. It is not, however, science fiction, not as we know it. Nor is it a full-on psychodrama. Ned isn't insane or vengeful or murderous. He may be mentally ill, he may be delusional, but he's no Norman Bates. And despite poignant moments of black humor front-loaded with some barbed critiques of the upper middle class morals of '60s US society, it's impossible to imagine it a comedy as it's as serious as a [ __ ] heart attack. So, what is The Swimmer? Impossible to pigeonhole is what. We could just call it an existential drama. It's likely about unreliable memory, conflicting reality, and a man in crisis wherein his personality disintegrates in collision with the concrete world around him. Not the snappiest of labels, I'll grant you, but as descriptive as it gets from my end. Quite how this film turned out as good as it did is nothing short of a minor miracle. The team of director Frank Perry and his screenwriter wife Eleanor handled the groundwork with principal photography wrapping in September 1966.

[00:04:09]Producer Sam Spiegel, who later had his name removed from the credits, then fired Perry as he felt the film was a confused and unwatchable mess. He parachuted in young hotshot director Sydney [ __ ] a friend of Lancaster's, for reshoots, transition scenes, and replacement scenes using replacement actors for some characters. Filming completed in '67, and the film was released in '68. Yours truly never caught it in a cinema, only as a Monday night movie on BBC One in the mid-'70s.

[00:04:39]I didn't expect to be mesmerized and blown away by it, but that I most certainly was. It's one man's journey into his own personal heart of darkness.

[00:04:48]Burt Lancaster is our subject and the vessel who carries us along on his adventure or misadventure every step of the way. We experience vicariously whatever he does and what happens to him as we try to piece together what's going on. Lancaster built a screen image based on a persona of confidence, swagger, self-assuredness, blue-eyed, grinning, posturing, action hero manhood, which is how Ned Merrow presents at the outset.

[00:05:13]Aging but well-preserved suburban beefcake hound dog and party animal.

[00:05:18]Then the actor, the star show, bravely dismantles that carefully curated construct before our very eyes, fragment by tortured fragment as the film progresses. An astonishing, possibly career-best piece of work, his most subversive showing. It is Lancaster's deconstruction of his personal iconography that brands events so impactful and emotionally affecting. He not only unravels psychologically, but also physically deteriorates from a position of masculine strength and prowess to one of exhausted weakness and howling despair. This is the film in which Lancaster strips to the bone both the character he's playing and the mythology of his movie image. All credit to him having the courage to do that.

[00:06:03]Let's consider four things. That which is time, that which is perception, that which is reality, and that which is the end.

[00:06:12]>> That which is time.

[00:06:16]>> Where does the time go? We think it, we say it. Well, it don't go anywhere. It's a human concept to give shape and meaning to existence, order and structure to our lives. Yet, even though it is measured by established standards, it is different for all of us. Certainly different for Ned Merrill. As he pool hops on his journey, it soon becomes apparent he is operating in a different time zone to those he encounters. Others are puzzled when he talks of his daughters as though they are young children, repeatedly referenced as being at home playing tennis. They're always playing tennis, his wife is always waiting for him. A mantra he replicates throughout an emphatic automatic response. When he runs across his new bio ex babysitter Julie, Janet Landgard, he has difficulty processing she is now 20 years of age. Even though he can't possibly square this time wise with his daughters still being kids, he makes a date for her to come over and babysit again. Later, he explains it away as a joke, which suggests he might or suspect something is very much amiss here. His time frame is disrupted. He's stuck at a point three or four years in the past.

[00:07:22]Does he have early onset dementia, a brain tumor, or is it a deliberate case of selective amnesia, psychological defense mechanism? Is he attempting a life reset? Take your pick. The pool hopping itself is a metaphor for time travel. Time conceived as an imaginary river moving forward into the present, never back, gradually bringing Ned up to date to a point where implacable realization is inevitable. Friends comment to Ned that physically he hasn't aged a bit in the past few years.

[00:07:52]Mentally, the same also appears to be true.

[00:07:56]>> That which is perception.

[00:08:00]>> Like time, perception is personal.

[00:08:02]Perception is everything. Ned's perception is initially firm and fixed.

[00:08:06]Each stop, each waypoint, each pool navigated on his journey he sees his self insight thrown into question and challenged. The cracks start to manifest and widen. Incrementally, it all begins to fracture and break down. Delusions are firm fixed beliefs that cannot be reasoned with by any form of logic, and Ned is delusional. Yet even as the evidence stacks up around him, he cleaves desperately crumbling facade of his existence. Julie joins him on his journey for part of the way. She naively sees his quest as romantic. She confesses to once having had a teenage crush on him. Ned imagines this translates directly into her current life and rather creepily comes on to her, placing his hand on her naked abdomen perilously close to the old bikini line there, chap. He tells her he will take care of her, be her guardian angel. A 20-year-old Julie is horrified and runs for it. Confused, Ned can't imagine why. Surely she loves him, doesn't she? She said as much. When he meets young Kevin, Michael Curney, he finds a lonely 10-year-old boy left in the charge of the housemaid whilst his mother is away on honeymoon. Ned is crestfallen on discovering their pool has been drained. This is due to Kevin being a weak swimmer, for his protection. He then decides that they should climb down into the dry pool and pretend swim the length. Kevin insists this would be a lie. Ned is adamant that the truth is wherever you want it to be.

[00:09:31]If you make believe hard enough that something is true, then it is true for you, he says. If you believe you swam the length of the pool, then you did.

[00:09:39]Now, why does this life view sound so damn familiar nowadays? Even a 10-year-old boy is not convinced, knows the difference between truth and falsehood, and quite rightly so. But Ned has his story, and he's sticking to it.

[00:09:54]>> That which is reality.

[00:09:58]>> In the head of Ned, he's a high-flying corporate demigod on a massive salary.

[00:10:03]He has a wife who loves him, two daughters who idolize him, a big house with tennis court, but oddly, no swimming pool, like you would imagine, considering he's such a keen swimmer and all. Yet he will use the pools of his neighbors quite happily. He's an egocentric social predator who never met a woman he didn't flirt with, initiate physical contact with, or in some cases, more. A serial adulterer, as we will come to learn. Indications that all is not well start out small and indistinct, but the closer Ned gets to home, the more fraught and hostile his treatment by others becomes. Pool three, and Ned is met with cold rancor by Mrs. Hammer, Cordelia Otis Skinner. For a start, he swam in her pool without permission. He was supposedly a friend of her son, but never visited or called when he was hospitalized. Ned asks, belatedly and inadequately, if he's better now.

[00:10:53]Judging by Mrs. Hammer's reaction, the unsaid truth is that he died. She warns Ned, in no uncertain terms, to never set foot on her land again. Pool four, and people are sympathizing with Ned about what happened to him. Ned brushes it all off, is evasive, but the clear implication is something untoward occurred regarding his career and employment status. At the Hallorans, wealthy, elderly naturist husband and wife, House Jameson and Nancy Cushman, are unfazed by Ned's eccentric behavior.

[00:11:23]They are sat there stark bollock naked, after all. But theory has dropped by to borrow money, again. Seems he's done it before and never paid them back. Ned crashes the pool party of Grace and Henry Biswanger, Louise Troy, and Dolph Sweet. This is a bacchanalian affair, complete with groovy '60s music, dancing, and drunkenness beneath the auspices of an elaborate curved aluminum and Perspex structure. If any scene dates the film, this would be the one.

[00:11:50]Weary feeling a chill, Ned swims the pool, emerging to recognize a hot dog cart, which he claims belongs to him.

[00:11:57]Grace insists it was bought in a white elephant sale. Ned gets into an altercation with Henry and hobbles away in shame. Now walking with a pronounced limp due to a worsening hamstring injury. Ned shows up at the backyard pool of stage actress Shirley Abbott, Janice Rule, for what is the most dramatically eviscerating confrontation in the film. Both Lancaster and Rule are superb in this two-hander. Ned had a long-standing sexual affair with Shirley. Then he callously ditched her in favor of life with his wife and daughters. Filled with resentment and bitter regret, Shirley savagely tears into him while slowly realizing that something is very wrong with this guy.

[00:12:36]Ned reminds her of past times spent together, but his recollections do not tally with hers. When he asks if she recalls her stay in Vermont last year, she responds that she hasn't set foot in Vermont for at least 3 years. Janice Rule especially nails down the woman scorned routine in fine, emotionally lacerating style. An underestimated actress right there. Reeling from Shirley's unequivocal rejection and questioning why the sun seemingly cast no heat, shivering, barefoot, Ned finds himself on a highway full of fast-moving traffic as he reels unsteadily in the path and slipstream of speeding vehicles with engines roaring and horns blaring.

[00:13:16]Dangerous chaos, cacophony, confusion.

[00:13:19]Once he has begged for money to pay the entrance fee to the municipal pool, he is humiliated by by attendant and then encounters some very angry and hostile locals once his swim is done. Owners of local businesses who claim he has unsettled debts, unpaid bills. One such accuser, Howie Bill Feury, intimates that his daughters were uncontrollably wild, scandalous, promiscuous, into drinking, and involved in a car crash, which Ned paid off law enforcement to hush up. Furthermore, they held their father in nothing but contempt, making fun of and disrespecting him behind his back, seeing him as a big joke. Ned flees the pool area into the hills.

[00:14:02]>> That which is the end.

[00:14:06]>> All journeys come to an end one way or another. Twilight descends, the sun is sinking, the air takes on a bitter chill, a rain falls. Ned arrives at the rusted gates of his home. The grounds are overgrown, the tennis courts abandoned and in a dire state of disrepair. Dead leaves litter the ground as if summer has suddenly and without warning magically morphed into autumn.

[00:14:28]But how could that be? As Ned reaches the front door of his home, the downpour increases, lashing the ground. He finds the place locked and derelict. Windows are broken, the house has been gutted.

[00:14:39]It is empty, a shell, abandoned. Wife and daughters long gone. All that remains are broken tennis rackets protruding from mildewed cardboard boxes in the lounge. Ned beats on the door and wails, all to no avail. He collapses as exhausted and desolate in the pouring rain.

[00:14:58]I told myself I would never review The Swimmer. Too difficult, too complex, too good for the likes of me to go poking around in its guts. My good friend Street suggested sometime back I review an earlier film by Frank and Eleanor Perry, Ladybug Ladybug, and that felt doable, so I did it. But The Swimmer, not so much. What changed my mind? I had a recent urge to watch it again, and the Blu-ray transfer by Indicator from 2022, a reworking of Grindhouse Films 2014 crack at it, is a wonderful and gorgeous thing to behold. And I thought, you know, I could do this with a few caveats. Keep it simple, don't overthink it, don't over-intellectualize it. Leave such things to those who know what they're doing. And with that, I've given it a shot. Incidentally, it marked the debut of Marvin Hamlisch as a composer of film scores, and his work here is instantly recognizable to me, as well as being a great primer on how to craft dramatic accompaniment. The action and locations are painstakingly, lovingly captured by two cinematographers, David L. Quaid for the original cut, and Michael Nebbia, who lends the reshoots.

[00:16:05]They merge seamlessly, so you'd never know it. Now, after all these years, I still don't know conclusively what to make of it. A satire about the death of the American dream filtered through the memorial recession of a very flawed and damaged man, a ghost lost soul traversing his own personal River Styx to arrive at his own personal hell, a portrait of an escaped mental patient whose rejection of reality cannot and will not hold, or a story about a failed idealist who thinks that if he believes it, then it must be true, and gets a rude awakening, because reality always bites in the end for everyone, and bites hard. One of the taglines promoting the film was, "When you talk about the swimmer, will you talk about yourself?"

[00:16:47]Joe Jackson's song "Don't Want to Be Like That" poses the question, "I know you think that you know, but how do you know that what you know is true?" We're all guilty to some degree of believing what we choose to, sometimes in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

[00:17:02]Most of us, though, unless it's a matter of faith, as the jury's always going to be out on those, wind up conceding defeat to the cold, hard facts of reality, and resignedly facing up to and accepting them. But what happens to those who don't, or, for whatever reason, can't.

[00:17:19]I'll leave you to figure it out.

[00:17:23]Grateful thanks for your time and attention. Feel free to do whatever you choose to do next. Hit like, don't like, comment, subscribe, check out my early access Patreon thing, or even make a very welcome financial contribution via the thanks button. Man, I struggled with this, probably overreached, was never all that keen on having to work hard on stuff, but it's done now. I think I'll blunder something easier next. Famous last words, eh? Soon, pilgrims.