Customer Reviews

Swimmer, The

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I just watched this movie and now deem it one of the best movies ever made....The whole story is a brilliant metaphor for the individual who reaches mid-life hoping to have made something wonderful of his own life and realizes that his "place" in society will not allow him to be all he can be. He must be just like all the others and never have an original thought of his own. The storyline is linear - he goes from pool to pool in a straight line - but his emotional state may well have been completely nonlinear and understandable only to those who have a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.

I first watched this film..in another language when I was a kid. How best to illustrate the impact it had on me? After 25 years I still remembered the story of it. Of a man swimming home and of the last scene where he coming home to find an empty, isolated house.

Flash back to the present. I found this movie by accident in the library. Wondering if it's the same one stuck in my mind for so long so I checked it out. The impact of watching it this time was still there (just a bit less since I already know the ending).

All in all it's really worth seeing. It left an unforgettably emotional impact on me..as a 10-year-old child. That's how best I could put it to say how good the movie is.

an unforgettable film.
it defies all explanation and remains a hidden classic art film.
comparisons to the twilight zone seem to do it little justice, not that i am knocking the twilight zone at all.
but perry's film is far more complex and multi latered than that.
and lancaster;
the older he got the more risks he took and this is a brauva performance.
we see his world slowly decaying. we know whats coming, yet you will probabaly still walk away mumbling incoherently to yourself for a few hours afterwords.
but,if you're looking for a fast paced film, look elsewhere. this film challenges you and from what ive seen of some of the reivews it was a bit too challenging for some (right-o new jersey?), but if you are prepared to reconsider your views on what film is and isnt, then be prepared to be walloped.

This film is unique in all the american filmography. You may exhibit several examples about the question of the loneliness , like Sunset boulevard, Midnight cowboy, the naked kiss or even Butterfield 8. These films are worthy. But no film before and even thirty six years (with the exceptions of Paris Texas and American beauty) had approached the question in just so brutally dramatic, showing the naked soul of a mature man in a suden decadence.
Perry had the Midas touch when the story goes through all the swimming pool of Kentucky.
An intimate portrayal,a collage that describes like a few, the roughness, the cruelty the indifference of the human condition around a man who lost his center, his eaning for living, and surviving just by feeding his memories.
His ancient friends, his old love affairs , show us with no mercy the unboreble loneliness of this man who was once and now he's just a post card human, a colection piece , a lost specimen
from an old tale.
Lancaster gives us an unforgettable performing. I{m absolutely sure that the character of Lancaster in Atlantic city, was so easy to Burt, due he applied the emotive memory, apart his notable skills.
The swimmer is a cult movie. It's a acid view about a society who doesn't accept the failure, which runs from a lonely man who doesn't have to say excepts his memories.
Do you remember the sequence when he tries to get into the swimming pool in which he must to clean his feet before to get in? . The metaphor is so absorbing and fascinating that you can not forget easily. And the ending is very close to a horror film.
Please, don't forget this ending and try to tie with the end of 21 grams.
Momma dearest was made several years after. But in my particular opinion. Frank Perry will be remembered by this unvaluable gem of the best artistic expression american cinema.

A surreal film about one man's descent into shock, paranoia and despair. Burt Lancaster is riveting in his portrayal of a wealthy executive who cannot (or will not) face the facts of his family's disintegration. Lancaster's image as a macho guy is turned upside down in this film, as we see him in a vulnerable, almost pathetic state by the film's end. Clad only in swimtrunks (or less) for the entire film, his character is metaphorically naked, defenseless against an onslaught of jaded ex-lovers, uncaring acquaintances, and hostile enemies. An odd, arty film, outside the main of Lancaster's other work but well worth viewing for his excellent acting and the powerful message of the film.

Sure, it's like a "Twilight Zone" episode. In fact, I wish it were more like one, because then it would not be the 90 minute mess that it is. When I saw this movie, it seemed like about half of it was dedicated to Burt Lancaster running around as Marvin Hamlisch's atrocious score blasts away.

I'm not against the idea of putting "The Swimmer" to film, but this was not the way to do it. In addition to the boredom this movie induced, I suspect it would have made me extremely confused had I not been familiar with the original tale. The Cheever story involves a man's life collapsing around him -- he loses his youth, his social status, and his money as he swims from pool to pool over the course of an afternoon. At the same time, it gets colder and the season changes from summer to autumn. None of this was apparent in this movie, though. I could easily imagine a viewer taking the whole thing literally -- certainly not what Cheever intended.

Instead of being an allegory, it just seemed that Burt Lancaster had lost his sanity in addition to everyone else -- living as if the previous three, five, or however many years of his life had not occured. Burt Lancaster's frequent blank stares only made the main character seem crazier.

If you want to laugh at a film that makes very little sense and is filled with really dated music, then feel free to watch this. Otherwise, just stick to the reading the short story. You'll have more than an hour to spare!

An interesting but flawed film tracing man's journey from the foetus to the grave, using the unusual premise of one man swimming a succession of his neighbours' backyard pools to reach home. Previous correspondents have set out the details of the story superbly, so no need to here, but my reading of the film differs slightly.
The film appears to be more about the struggle to hold one's head above water, in a metaphoric sense, than about Ned Merrill's state of mind (alcoholism is the predominant theory). In other words, our attempts to delay the inevitability of death are gradually revealed in Ned's odyssey, as he battles hostility (from the mother of a deceased friend), rejection (from a jilted lover), barely concealed scorn (by resentful & snobbish neighbours), humiliation (attempting to cross a busy highway clad only in swimming trunks) etc. Each episode pieces together a picture of us, swimming upstream and against the tide of time, despairing of ever reaching our goals.
Ned's odyssey falls at the final hurdle - he has run out of time, as time runs out eventually for us all.
A bleak interpretation perhaps, and maybe nothing like what the film-makers, or John Cheever, comtemplated.... but.

Or not so plain and hardly simple.

My admiration for the shorter fiction of John Cheever knows no bounds, but this movie goes an already great short story one better. Great movies, of course, are made of very different stuff than great fiction. How, for example, to turn "Citizen Kane" into a great novel or "Ulysses" into a great film? Yet the reason this film works is "time"...

The story itself is well known: At the home of some friends one "midsummer Sunday," a successful, middle-aged advertising executive named Neddy Merrill decides, peculiarly perhaps (though with much symbolism, Freudian and otherwise), to swim the length of suburbia, from one friend's pool to another, until he reaches home, where his wife and daughters (he believes) are waiting for him. At each pool, however, his friends appear a little less friendly (and, by the end, downright hostile), and we begin to see that time is passing a little too quickly, that midsummer is turning into late fall, that there is a chill in the air and storm clouds in the sky, and that, by the time Ned reaches the end of his journey, his life is in ruin, and that his entire existence has been "drained" in the course of a single afternoon. Funny how realizations of a wasted lifetime creep up on us that way.

So here, perhaps, is the rub. In Cheever's story, a whole lifetime passes in one day, which passes in eight pages. In Frank Perry's movie, a whole lifetime passes in one day, which passes in about an hour and 40 minutes. The fifteen minutes or so required to read the original is too short, the time goes by too swiftly. This is a story that longs to be fleshed out (okay, pun intended), so that the shifting of Ned's fortunes and his realization of just how much he's lost seem more gradual, more subtle.

Each encounter at each pool is like a variation on a theme. As the people from the first pool come walking over to the second while Ned swims away, we get a superb sense of temporal dislocation (the original theme is still perceptible in the background, but already the changes are being wrought): It is still the same morning in the friends' world, but years have passed in Ned's life, and this is emphasized by his encounter at the third pool, where he finds himself unwelcome at the house of an old friend who has since died. Ned not only fails to realize this at first, he doesn't even remember his friend having been sick. Although the camaraderie is recovered at the next pool, the dark clouds have made their presence felt.

The encounter with his daughters' old baby-sitter, Julie (a naively beautiful Janet Landgard [and what an ironic name in this context!]), is a deviation from the original story, but works superbly as it serves at least two purposes: to bring home the unstoppable passage of time (as when Ned asks Julie if she can baby-sit his daughters that weekend even though, in "real" time, they've grown up already), and, when she flees his overweening embrace, to further illustrate just how much has escaped him, both figuratively and literally.

The most haunting scene, however, occurs when Ned reaches an empty swimming pool guarded over by a young, towheaded boy playing the flute, a vision that conjures up images of lost innocence and invokes an extraordinary emotional yearning (and as much emptiness as the cracked concrete below him can provide) that the original story could not quite match.

And who could fail to be moved by that final image of an irrevocably broken man, crouched in the fetal position and weeping in front of a house long-ago abandoned and left to molder, or the scene just before it, where Ned has to swim through the final dirty, crowded, but too-heavily chlorinated public pool (my, how the mighty have fallen!)? "Stings, doesn't it?" Jan Minor asks, and the line stings as well.

Burt Lancaster, by any stretch one of stardom's most exceptional actors, here gives the performance of his career. The gleam in the eye, that unrelentingly toothy grin, that look of sheer obsession. At first so full of the vigor of youth, but by the end a (self-)defeated, frightened man, straining against himself to understand what happened, when and where literally everything went wrong. Who but Burt Lancaster could have pulled off such a miracle? Kudos, too, to Janice Rule for her portrayal of Shirley Abbott, a one-time lover: a character in a situation that could so easily have seemed cliche here achieves the status of classical tragedy. And note the cameo appearance by John Cheever himself, looking somehow peculiarly diminutive but ever dapper; a standout in the type of crowd he so brilliantly portrayed.

And was there ever a more poignant score than that which Marvin Hamlish provided?

"The Swimmer," the short story, is a great work of fiction, but "The Swimmer," the movie, is a great work of art. "One man's shattering Sunday odyssey through suburbia," as TV Guide once so unforgettably put it. Cheever couldn't have said it better himself.

The Swimmer is one my all time favorite films. The DVD transfer is absolutely incredible. The music is one of the best soundtracks I have ever heard, haunting, sad, exciting. The film works as a sort of jigsaw puzzle. When Burt Lancaster appears seemingly from nowhere clad only in swimming trunks which he wears for the entire film, we know nothing about him except through the comments and reactions of the various people he meets throughout his journey. The supporting cast is excellent and the photography stunning. As the plot slowly unravels we learn more and more about his character. To reveal anymore would spoil the film. Highly recommended.

This is one of those films that leaves you thinking, but you wonder what you're thinking about. It intentionally ends ambiguously so that the viewer isn't exactly sure what he or she has just seen.

There are sections when you think the plot is going one way, then aburptly you realize what you thought was taking place wasn't. It is well-written in that regard, in that it holds your interest, but changes focus periodically. Rapport is built for the chief character at various points, but in the end you're not quite sure if he's a victim or a perpetrator of wrong. He's misunderstood and not easily categorized. Did he do the things the other characters say he did? Or was did they misunderstand him?