During an impromptu visit to a friend’s pool, Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) has a sudden epiphany - all the properties between his friend’s home and his own have pools.
He can swim his way home.
As Ned’s strange journey progresses, he swims into his neighbours’ lives, and the purpose behind his obsession begins to fall apart…
Bizarre, fascinating, unsettling and so annoyingly obvious in equal measure, The Swimmer is one of those movies where the more I write about it, the more I want to watch it again.
Based on a short story by John Cheever, the movie is an allegorical psychodrama of one man’s journey into his own self.
Released as the clash of generations came to a head at the end of the Sixties, the film feels like a mirror of the coming end of the postwar boom.
These people are wealthy and empty.
Perfectly cast, Burt Lancaster stands out as the most physically impressive of his muddled aged friends.
Athletic and sexually forward, openly flirting with every woman he sees, Ned seems to be more alive and chaotic than his staid surroundings.
As the film progresses from pool to pool, his Boheme becomes more static, his smile too forced, his eyes sparkling with a mania.
What could have looked like a celebration of the aging star’s virility never settles.
Lancaster is fantastic. Everything that makes him slightly outsized - the charm and too-wide smile - is pushed too far.
As he interacts with more people, there is a growing disconnect between the way he acts and the way his new scene partners do.
Something is wrong with this man. He seems completely disconnected from whoever he is interacting with - making the same repetitive statements about his family, while his attempts at schmoozing seem far more conniving.
I am torn on Marvin Hamlisch’s score - like Lancaster, it mirrors his detachment from the context around him.
Sometimes it feels like a case of Mickey mousing, aping the action onscreen.
Other times it feels like Hamlisch is trying to overdo it, working against the tone.
The Swimmer was Hamlisch’s debut as a film composer, and it makes for an interesting pairing with his penultimate score, The Informant!, Steven Soderbergh’s more satirical take on a man detached from reality.
Directed by Frank Perry, with significant reshoots directed by Sydney Pollack, The Swimmer never gets bogged done.
Some of the allegory feels a shade obvious - but that is down to the emphasis on dialogue.
I put this down to personal taste, wanting the film to be a shade more elliptical. But the dialogue is effective - people talk around their problems until Ned meets people who do not care about niceties.
Lancaster’s physique turns from an object of spectacle into a vulnerability.
Limping along a highway, stumbling through the shower of a crowded public pool - suddenly he is presented as he is, not a suburban stud but a troubled old man tilting at his own peculiar crusade.
The scene with the pool employee demanding that he take a shower before swimming is a final signifier of his collapse in status, and the puncturing of his confidence - he has breezed through other people’s lives without being concerned about the consequences.
Now he is grounded.
The ending is the film’s saving grace. Even with all its strengths, I had a nagging feeling the film was not going to pull it off.
But then Lancaster stumbles into his own property, and any criticisms that had been brewing washed away.
His home is closed and boarded up, the grounds overgrown. And the weather, once bright sunshine, has turned to dark skies and heavy rain.
It is a final Gothic lurch that is the movie finally finding a tenor to match Lancaster’s out-sized delusions.
Instead of the virile outsider of his square friends, Ned is an extreme version of their own vacuousness, with his idyllic life ultimately revealed to just be an illusion.
