The Swimmer

Related Content

• The Weekly Wire: This Week's Recommended Events
  December 14, 2011
• Short Stories Live! A Rogue's Christmas
  December 7, 2011
• Sweet Smell of Success
  March 30, 2011
• Red Desert
  December 7, 2011
• The Beaver: Mel Gibson, Slightly Redeemed
  May 4, 2011

More About

• Burt Lancaster
• Sydney Pollack
• Frank Perry
• Westchester
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Frank Perry and Sydney Pollack's relatively unloved The Swimmer (1968) is one of the oddest Hollywood films ever made: nakedly existentialist, Kafkaesque in its structural metaphor, Beckettian in its deadened rhythms. Expanding upon but remaining faithful to John Cheever's brief, dry-eyed suburban wail, the film maintains a first-person association with Burt Lancaster's disoriented Westchester family man as he swims his way home through his uncongenial (and often outright wary) neighbors' pools, a journey during which summer turns to autumn, and suburban belonging becomes lonesome madness. The movie was derided in 1968 as pretentious and faux-solemn, but time has revealed it to be a compelling bizarrerie that seems altogether courageous, visually potent (Lancaster's dwindling man loping half-naked through the forest and across highways), and chilling. As semi-subconscious fables of modern masculine displacement go, it rivals Frankenheimer's Seconds. (NR) MICHAEL ATKINSON
July 10-16, 9 p.m.; Sat., July 11, 5 p.m., 2009