The Swimmer

As I watched The Swimmer, I kept thinking to myself where I'd seen the movie before. Not literally, but its structure, exploration of themes, and central character. Burt Lancaster plays Ned, an ad exec who lives in a an area of Connecticut where everybody is rich, has acres of land, live in a constant state of cocktail partying, and everyone has a pool. The Swimmer literally starts off with Ned emerging from the woods in the backyard of a friend, chit-chat, "haven't seen you in a while", and then Ned gets a crazy idea; he's going to hike, as he puts it, "across the county", swimming in the pools of each neighbor in a chain, until he's back home to his wife and two daughters. Why? He can't really say, he just needs to. Big emphasis on "need", too; he is not just adamant about refusing a car ride, he declines the offers in a way that's almost an allergic reaction. If you're smart -- and by smart, I mean "have an IQ above a sock" -- then you know where The Swimmer is going with Ned's bizarre personal quest. There's no mystery on if he makes it, and there's no mystery on how it ends. All that's left up in the air is what happens between point A and point B. This is a movie about a man having a nervous breakdown after a midlife crisis has detonated his world, so his journey is watching him unravel, as each pool along the way peels back the layers he's built to insulate himself from the truth he can't face. It was right as I sat down to start this, staring at the screen and unsure how to begin, that it clicked for me where I'd seen this: The Swimmer is a kinder, gentler version of Falling Down. Of course, Falling Down externalizes its main character's frustrations and disappointments of their own life by weaponizing them against the world in a sort of blind, inchoate, nihilistic rampage to make the world a better place (if only in D-FENS' mind and to his standards). The Swimmer internalizes it; Ned is not violent, but is in a state of deep denial which he vigorously protects. He cannot and will not consider anything that might breach his bubble. It is in that difference, and how the world around Ned/D-FENS responds to it, that Falling Down gets it right and The Swimmer fails. D-FENS' rampage through Los Angeles takes him on a winding path through unfamiliar areas of town, conducting what he believes is a moral crusade to make things right in the world, given that his own personal world has spun out so very wrong. He doesn't intend for these stops to become miniature stand-offs against the broken American dream; he's just trying to get home for his daughter's birthday, and each one of the stops unknowingly serves up a circumstance that picks at one of the unraveling threads of his sanity. Each stop escalates his response to a situation more and more, until he kills the racist military surplus store owner, at which point D-FENS has transcended a point of no return. All the while, a cop chases him. Contrast this to Ned's journey. He hikes through wooded areas and backyards. Half the people he meets are having cocktail parties. Almost everybody knows him and greets him, even if some less than jovial. We know, from the first minute he emerges from a forest in nothing but swimming trunks, that he's gone round the bend, just like D-FENS. The problem The Swimmer has is it doesn't want you to get ahead of it even though it's borderline impossible, and what attempts it makes to hide Ned's shattered mental state requires the world to facilitate his madness in a way that simply would not happen. Nobody questions it when Ned first comes out of the forest, it's just "hey, haven't seen around, want a martini?". When he concocts his insane plan, nobody points out the reality of what he'll find at the end (an empty, derelict house). If this was meant to be some kind of commentary on how disconnected from reality neighbors can be, it fails, because there are multiple stops along the way where someone should know better and should raise the point. One of the next stops brings him to some young adults, one of whom is the former babysitter for Ned's kids, who are now old enough not to need a babysitter. Ned acknowledges this in a way, but then insists on "hiring" said babysitter for a job the next weekend. At no point does the babysitter point out that his daughters are grown up. When he comes across another garden party, he finds one of them has an old hot dog cart he made. They say they bought it at a white elephant sale, but conveniently stop short of saying anything else. This happens over and over and over again, and it feels so forced and designed to protect Ned as a character and we the audience, so we can get to the ending that was painfully obvious after the first five minutes. Falling Down, at least, has its character trek through unfamiliar terrain, so there's nothing there to reinforce or destroy the false reality he's built around himself. For ninety minutes, I kept thinking "will someone just say the thing everybody seems to know?!?". The Swimmer bends over backwards to facilitate Ned's delusion, and it ruins his journey. Every time he's weird or creepy or gross, The Swimmer wants to waive it away and make him sympathetic again, because it wants to force us to stay in lockstep with its pacing. It puts up neon signs that spell out where its going, but tells you not to turn your head to read them. Yeah, I have peripheral vision, movie. And a functioning brain. It's a shame, too, because Burt Lancaster is acting at Academy Award levels here. There is almost a sympathetic edge to Ned. His quest may be mad, and he may be using it to hide from reality, but many of us have had situations where we don't want to face the truth and will take steps to avoid it. There's an honesty to his lie, as weird as that sounds, and an honesty to how The Swimmer depicts his cocooning inside his comfortable lie, because the truth is painful. But, unlike Falling Down, it's not honest in the world around him and how they see his mental state. The Swimmer wants to put forth the idea it's making a commentary on neighbors being disconnected from each other and the dangers of "polite society", but it just feels like a script bending over backwards to facilitate a story in an unnatural way. I can give credit to the acting, and the idea of The Swimmer is way ahead of its time, but its courage ends there. It can't or won't hold Ned accountable, and by extension, doesn't seem to respect its audience enough to explore the themes it teases. For a movie where swimming is so important, The Swimmer is, metaphorically speaking, afraid to jump in its own pool.