The Swimmer

A box office failure in its heyday, 1968’s The Swimmer has since attained status as a cult film. Based on John Cheever’s short story of the same name, The Swimmer is an odd exploration of suburban malaise, the ennui of one man who has since been closed off from his privileged lifestyle, or a hallucinatory descent into purgatory. It one of the most experimental and weird films of Burt Lancaster’s career, and one of his absolute best.

The Swimmer is also an ode to Lancaster’s muscular body as he was headed towards 50. He wears the skimpiest of trunks throughout and little else, including one brief nude scene that proves his taunt body would be the envy of several men half his age. Lancaster’s muscularity and physical dynamism were frequently on proud display throughout his film work, but The Swimmer provides initial titillation in drinking him in before stripping that away to reveal a broken man.

Which is not to say that Lancaster’s emotional range is also not on display as his gut rot performance is a revelation. This film is buried beneath the flashier titles of his previous work (From Here to Eternity, Elmer Gantry), but this might be his trickiest and best performance. He must immediately engage our attention by strolling through the households like a panther that gradually dissolves as how he thinks of his character and how the other think of him come into conflict. The tension between the interior and exterior must be read from moment-to-moment in Lancaster’s work as he alternates between self-mythology and its mirage-like reality.

We never entirely get concrete details about what this man did for living, what ostracized him, or how he managed to seemingly manifest out of thin air and appear in the backyard of a former neighbor. We follow his journey home as he realizes that he could “swim home” by taking a lap in every pool in the backyard between this starting point and his final destination. The reveal that his house is a dilapidated and abandoned relic only heightens the surrealism of what has preceded this climax.

Whatever the literal truth is at the heart of The Swimmer does not matter. I prefer to think of it as something of a remodel of the myth of Narcissus. Someone else could think of it as a purgatorial passion-like punishment, or an allegory for one man’s possible recklessness and alcoholic destruction, or maybe he’s simply lost his mind and is replaying various memories that span decades into a singular afternoon. The literal-minded truth does not matter as much as the symbolic power of the story.

The Swimmer details the passive observation of one man’s identity. His amnesia-like relationship to his life causes him to rediscover and reconsider the illusionary nature of safety his community provided. This malaise and terror become ours as Lancaster’s stoic face crumbles and he represents every man’s fear of abandonment and obsolescence. Please seek this movie out.