Watch The Graduate but Adjust Your Expectations Beforehand

I had heard quite a bit about The Graduate (1967). For a film to still be so involved in public discourse nearly sixty years later typically indicates that the film was of a high caliber (or that it was a massive and embarrassing flop). Nonetheless, when I watched it, I was a little disappointed, frankly. It left me with an aftertaste against to that of a modern cheesy romcom, not the aftertaste that I associate with prestige cinema. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy The Graduate. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I had a lovely time watching the movie and laughed the entire way. I would also be down for a rewatch. It’s just that I didn’t find the film to match my expectation of a thought-provoking cinema piece.

A little background: The Graduate follows Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate, torn between an older woman who attempts to seduce him, and her daughter. All the while, Ben is still trying to figure out his future and what he wants in life. It’s like a coming-of-age story, except in your 20s rather than teenage years. Although his romantic question is marketed as the core conflict of the film, his interest in the daughter doesn’t start until nearly an hour into the 100-minute film. That’s a big issue for me, considering I wanted to watch The Graduate to see how this conflict would play out, not to just witness an hour of foreplay.

The Graduate (1967) was created at a pivotal moment for the film industry. It was during the time when the enforcement of the Hays Code was dissolving, meaning that films had more creative license to include mature, explicit, or heavy content. That temporal context most definitely shines through in The Graduate. Watching a movie from the 1960s, I was shocked by the amount of sexual content included. While the intensity of the content is by no means near that of recent movies, it is significantly more explicit and prolonged than films produced just a decade prior.

Heavy issues are not just suggested in The Graduate but are candidly shown. It doesn’t shy away from its depictions of infidelity and age-gap relationship dynamics. With those topics comes the potential for a quite thought-provoking piece. Considering its widespread acclaim, that is what I thought I was getting myself into when I pressed play on The Graduate.

The Graduate has an identity crisis on its hands. It’s thematically busy and seems to be wanting to do so much at the same time. Does it want to be romcom or a dark romance? Does it want to be thought-provoking, or does it want to be entirely fluffy and comedic? While many great films do combine genres, The Graduate seemed to be combining genres not for the sake of forwarding the film, but because it wasn’t yet aware of its identity. It was messy and chaotic—and not in a positive way like seen in surrealist works.

If anything, The Graduate feels like a melodrama. Emotions are front and center and drive the plot. There is also one of those cliché scenes that involves a romantic running in the pouring rain to their lover. We know that The Graduate prioritizes emotions, but we still don’t know what it wants to do with that emotional presence, whether it be comedy, dark romance, or a romcom.

The Graduate is worth a watch but perhaps you should adjust your expectations before watching because it’s not the thought-provoking masterpiece it is often made out to be.