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Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

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The first must-see film of the year.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This powerful film, had a huge effect on me, when i first saw it.I actually thought it was about swimming.Lancaster was made to play this part, and boy is he good in this fine work.A story of someone in a world of his own, who has blocked out reality, is superbly done, and with a great script. A film which hits the viewer like a ton of bricks at its end,and makes it compelling viewing. Avoid reading spoilers, as it will wreck your enjoyment of this excellent film.

I've always thought that the 1960s overall wasn't a great decade in film, although ironically the film that I think to be the best film of all time, 2001:A space Odyssey, came in the 60s and in the same year of this film, THE SWIMMER (1968), that I'm reviewing. "The Swimmer", a hidden gem of a masterpiece starring one of the most iconic star-actors in all of film history, the great Burt Lancaster, features arguably his greatest accomplishment as an actor. Probably no surprise that Lancaster didn't garner a Best Actor nod for this as it's an extremely surreal, odd, unsettling film experience that doesn't shout for awards.Lancaster brilliantly essays the complex role of Ned Merrill, an athletic, successful family man, who through the course of the film, taking place on a summer day in a sizable suburban Connecticut community, swims from pool to pool of different neighbors trying to make his way home to his wife and 2 daughters. The boastful, middle-aged Ned begins the film talking of his "perfect" life, great job, loving family, but as the film progresses, layers of both Ned's character and personal life get methodically revealed that shed away his confident demeanor piece by piece.Along his journey, Ned runs into his neighbors who, through stimulating and involving conversations, each helps to piece together the puzzle of Ned's life while revealing their own true natures. Ned slowly sees the hypocrisy and phoniness in the middle-class world he's been living in and that he has no real friends that he can count on when the chips are down. Ned becomes more disoriented and confused as he progressively gets treated with more vitriol and contempt from people in the community as the day wanes on. By the time Ned finds his way home, a devastating revelation lays in wait for both Ned and the viewer.What makes "The Swimmer" so challenging is that it can be interpreted as either 1) a literal happening of Ned swimming across the community and running into old "friends", OR 2) an allegory of the trajectory of the downfall of Ned's life, told in surrealistic fashion using the pool journey as the storyteller. A third interpretation is that it could simply be the thoughts of Ned in his dying moments, his life flashing before his eyes close for the last time. I love movies like this with both ambiguity AND depth of character! Burt Lancaster's pitch perfect performance, along with the beautiful photography and setting and surreal atmosphere, makes the film one of the most interesting pieces of cinema in both the 1960s as well as in film history!

This captures the nasty underbelly of the American Dream, and the cheesy music and 60s fashions (which some have criticized) actually underscore that. Where it falters is in being not quite as surreal as the story: in the movie, the neighbors' mentioning Neddy's mysterious absence implies that all his misfortunes, deserved or otherwise, may have already happened, and that he is out of touch with reality, convincing himself he is still happily married and rich. Some comments speculate that he had a psychotic break after losing his job and being divorced by his wife for his infidelities, one thought the red stain on his hands when he shook the gate was blood, and perhaps he had murdered his family. However one explains it, the movie makes it seem as if somehow these events could have happened already, Neddy gradually learning the truth in that one day.The original story was creepy in that at the start, Neddy really is rich and apparently happy: his odyssey through the water turns into a shortcut through his whole life. As he grows older, colder, and frailer, the weather changes from midsummer to late summer and finally to autumn. The social status that protected him at the start has diminished along with his money. The friends he once counted on abandoned him just as he had abandoned others as he moved up socially. The marriage and affairs he was apparently able to balance at the beginning blow up in his face: the mistress turns on him, and the wife has left him. I think the stain on his hands when he clutches the gate is meant to be rust; the house has been shut for some time. His shock is that of someone who arrives at later life wondering how he got there, how he drifted so far from where he thought he was going to go or the kind of person he thought he was. I'm not sure if the little boy afraid of water or the babysitter are bad additions. They do slow things down, but they also make him more human. He really isn't any worse or more shallow and materialistic than his neighbors; in a way, he suffers because he is LESS shallow, and begins to see the hollowness of his existence long before they ever will (if they ever do). I believe he's meant to be an Everyman--for everyone who ever arrived at later life wondering how he got there, how he drifted so far from where he thought he was going to go or the kind of person he thought he was.

"All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with." - Robert Boyd A cult classic, "The Swimmer" stars Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill. Realizing that the swimming pools of his neighbours "link" to form a "river" leading to his own home, Merrill decides to "swim" across his affluent Connecticut suburb. The film was based on a 1964 short story by the renowned John Cheever. It was directed by Frank Perry.Unmistakably a product of the 1960s, "The Swimmer" initially portrays Merrill as a glorious alpha male. Tall, bronzed and beautiful, Merrill exudes confidence. Those around him are equally lavish, all upper middle-classers in possession of extraordinary wealth. Like Merrill, they're all proto-yuppies, living lives dedicated to paper, profit and pushing product. The world outside their ornate cultural bubbles don't matter. Myopia is good when you're swimming in honey."The Swimmer", though, quickly mirrors the shared delusions of the upper classes to the private delusions of Merrill. Merrill, we learn, is blocking out the last two or three years of his life. Though he's lost his wealth, friends, family, home and business, Merrill parades about as though he's king of the world ("I'm splendid!"). He also aggressively represses the fact that he's a womanising drunk and an insensitive guy who bulldozed many others during his journey up the social ladder. He is a good guy, Merrill believes. He always was and still is."If you make believe hard enough that something is true," Merrill says, "then it is true." The line encapsulates the relativism which sustains Merrill's social class. Merrill and his neighbours create their own truths, their own realities, and are oblivious to life outside their perimeter fences. In this regard, Merrill has not really "gone mad"; he's always been oblivious to reality. His life has always been built on a foundation of lies.The spiritual ancestor of David Lynch's "The Straight Story", "The Swimmer" becomes increasingly surreal as it progresses. Timelines blur, characters step out of the past, and the film eventually reveals itself to be a four-way journey; not only Merrill's literal journey from pool to pool, but Merrill's symbolic journeys from the top of the social ladder to the bottom, from boyhood to adulthood and from blissful naivety to painful realisation."The Swimmer" ends with two powerful scenes. In the first, Merrill finds himself lost in a "lowly" public pool which ironically counterpoints the immaculate private pools seen during the film's first half ("Filters out ninety nine point ninety nine point ninety nine percent of all solid matter in the water!"). In this pool, surrounded by hordes of churning bodies, Merrill's now anonymous, a nobody, cast out with the very social dregs he's spent his life patronising. The following scene finds Merrill arriving at his home. His own Dorian Gray portrait, the building's dilapidated and marred with mud and grime."The Swimmer" is slow and dated in many places. For those willing to forgive its "flaws", though, this is an original and very influential picture which captures well a certain zeitgeist. And like the short stories of Raymond Carver, and of course Cheever himself, it is preoccupied with domesticated Americans, all struggling to find substance, value and meaning within the mores and rituals inculcated by post-war America.8/10 – See "Everything Must Go", "Goodbye, Columbus", "Ghost World", "Deep End" (1970) and "The Yellow Handkerchief".