Mrs. Robinson Seduced Me
Anne Bancroft died of uterine cancer yesterday at the age of 73, and was survived by her husband, Mel Brooks, and her son, Maximilian Brooks. She did great work playing Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, and she was also fabulous in The Turning Point. Her turn as a sort of Miss Manners at an assassin's academy was the best thing about Point of No Return, and she was an over-the-top delight as a modern-dress Miss Havisham in the 1998 film adaptation of Great Expectations.
But I’m like most people. I will always remember Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson. They say you never forget your first love, and for me that first love was…The Graduate. For years, it was my favorite movie, though by now it's simply a fact of life, like the Sun. I've seen The Graduate like some people saw Star Wars...dozens of times. For years, I watched that movie at least once a month. I've been scarred for life by The Graduate.
Why the movie affected me so is difficult to explain. From the moment the movie begins, with Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock flying home from college, we are taken on a journey with him, a young man who's worried about his future, which he wants to be..."different". The movie in its early stages holds us largely on the strength of the music by Simon and Garfunkel, and Ben's exquisite discomfort at the welcome home party his parents throw nominally on his behalf. And then Mrs. Robinson tries to seduce him...does seduce him, in fact, for all that it takes Ben a while to gather what little nerve he has, and go through with it.
Benjamin Braddock wants his future to be different, he doesn't want to be ordinary. He wants something larger, something glittering. And when he meets Elaine Robinson, that something presents itself: a young woman who is almost a living symbol for a grand passion. But it isn't his hopes or his idealism that see him through. It is through his affair, his introduction to the adult world of betrayal and compromise, and his ultimate rejection of it, that he gains the confidence and the social skills that enable him to defy convention, his family, and win Elaine Robinson. Mrs. Robinson made Benjamin Braddock worldly, but she also made him strong, she gave him a core. After having discovered just how lost he could be, it made him place a premium on finding something real. In a very real sense, Mrs. Robinson made him a man her daughter could fall in love with. Did any mother ever give her daughter a prettier wedding present?
Watching the movie, I always share Braddock's hopes and disillusion. I learn the lessons he learned. I think I'd know to go after my dream, if a chance at it presented itself to me. I just don't see that chance. And so I feel like Ben, in the movie, when he’s drifting in the pool. Benjamin tells his father, "It's very comfortable, just to drift." But of course he's lying.
It's partly Mrs. Robinson’s fault that I haven't made more of myself, I suppose. But I am a work in progress, and it will surely be partly her doing if I ever become the man I want to be. It took an actress with a great talent to portray the villain that Mrs. Robinson was, and her underlying vulnerability, and her great, untouched need for love. I owe Anne Bancroft a debt I cannot repay. Anne Bancroft, rest in peace.
5:49:23 PM 
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