The Swimmer movie review & film summary (1968)
Some of the pool owners are happy to see him. Others hate him. One is a bitter young woman who loved him once. We learn something about this man's life at every poolside, until finally we are able to piece together a story of his disgrace and failure.
"The Swimmer" begins as a perfectly realistic film. But somewhere along the way we realize it is an allegory, and the ending makes that clear. It is also a very stylized film. As the swimmer (Burt Lancaster) pauses beside each pool, his conversations with the owners sound real enough, and yet somehow they are very stiff, very correct, as if everybody were reading lines or this were a dream.
The photography contributes to this feeling. It is beautiful, but not joyful. It has the same nostalgia as "Elvira Madigan" or the snapshots in an old photo album. At every moment, we have the feeling that something tragic has already happened to these people we see smiling. And, of course, something has.
"The Swimmer" is based on a John Cheever story from the New Yorker, and it's the sort of allegory the New Yorker favors. Like assorted characters by John Updike and J.D. Salinger, Cheever's swimmer is a tragic hero disguised as an upper-class suburbanite. There are a lot of tragic heroes hidden in suburbia, I guess, perhaps because so many of them subscribe to the New Yorker. You are what you read.
One interesting thing about "The Swimmer" is that it manages so successfully to reproduce the feeling of a short story in the medium of film. It is a very literary movie, and by that I don't mean the characters stand around talking to each other a lot. The film episodes are put together in a rather formal way, like a well-made short story, and there is none of the fluid movement between scenes that you usually expect in movies.
The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.
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