8.5
Film4

Wow. One of the strangest, saddest, most weirdly tense films to come out of the 60s, The Swimmer features a tour-de-force lead performance by Burt Lancaster (maybe the single finest of his long career?) as a man whose single-minded determination to swim his way home via the pools of his rich friends takes the audience to some unexpectedly dark and surreal places. There is a rich mystery at the heart of the film, namely: what on earth is going on with Ned? His behaviour is oddly childlike and oblivious, as well as frequently inappropriate; most of his friends don't appear to have seen him in years, but Ned doesn't seem to realise that time has passed or remember much about his past. Is Ned suffering from a breakdown? A mid-life crisis? Is he dead? What happened to his family? The film doesnt offer any proper answers, instead allowing the story to unfold in a hazy, dreamlike fashion with copious use of ambiguous symbolism that might be fascinating or unsatisfying, depending on your tastes (indeed, given its dream-logic nature there is an argument to say that the entire film might well be simply happening in Ned's mind). What is undeniable is that Lancaster is utterly spellbinding from first to last, from tanned, bronzed Adonis at the start of the film to broken and defeated wretch by the end. And beneath the surface, The Swimmer represents a blistering critique of the American class divide, with the wealthy elite portrayed as living in an insulated and selfish world of decadence, snobbery, one-upsmanship and materialism, completely disconnected from reality. It is Ned's journey from that world towards reality (albeit a very painful reality) that forms the spine of the film and gives it its unique emotional power. In this way, you can see the clear influence that this film must have had on the works of David Lynch, in particular Blue Velvet. This is a genuinely fascinating film, a real hidden gem.