The film The Graduate is about a recent college graduate who is trying to find himself in life but gets caught in the middle of an affair and falling in love with a girl. In the words of Dr. Alexis Carrel, "Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor." Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is faced with the challenge of finding who or what he wants to be after he graduated. He struggles to fit and goes to any measure to try to fit in and as soon as he thought he was someone in life he realized that what he was doing was socially frowned upon and went on his journey to find himself.
Ben had just recently graduated from college and he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life; he didn’t know who he was. He was manipulated by his parents, family, and peers around him. He started to have an affair with a family friend who was married. He knew that what he was doing was wrong but didn’t know better.
As the film blatantly showed, Ben was an outcast and didn’t fit anywhere. For example, on his 21st birthday, his parents gave him a scuba suit. What kind of a 21st birthday present is that? As he jumps into the pool with his present, the camera zooms out and shows Ben underwater. As the camera keeps zooming out we see emptiness around him and how lonely he is.
After this incident, he makes a risky move and decides to have an affair with Mrs. Robinson. Ben keeps sneaking around with her renting rooms and having sex, but he feels that this is all wrong and that he wants relationship and not just a flimsy whore who cant get anything from her husband anymore. He tries to have a meaningful conversation with her but they end up fighting and he realizes that he does not want this. He ends up taking her daughter, Elaine, to dinner but treats her horribly but ant the end of their date he realizes that he really likes her and wants to spend more time with her. Unfortunately, Elaine and Mr. Robinson find out that Ben was having an affair with Mrs. Robinson so Elaine goes back to Berkley in hopes of never seen Ben again.
At this point Ben realized that the only way that he will be happy is if he is with Elaine, but the question is how to get her back. He ends up making the long drive up to Berkley to see her. When he does meet up with her she is not happy to see him. He tries to explain what really happened between her mother and him but its too late because she had left Berkley to marry her boyfriend.
Once again, Ben is on a downward spiral heading nowhere. His whole life he had been a lonely, miserable kid who didn’t seem to fit with anyone. He gets the courage to go find this wedding and stop it because the only person who really cared about him was Elaine and felt like he never felt before with her.
He finally found the wedding and stops it they run out with joyfully and without a care in the world. It seems that Ben has finally found the one person who can make him feel like someone in this world, but soon reality kicks in. Where are they going? Where are they going to live? What to do know? All these questions and more are running through their mind and the happiness is short lived.
After all these struggles and obstacles that Ben had to face, he got his girl and was on his way to a happy life. But the way the director ends the movie gives a kind of cliff hanger of whether or not they are actually happy because they never thought their pan over and had no idea what is ahead of them. Therefore, it may seem that all the effort that Ben put into this may not payoff at the end but he at least found a “name” for himself and found a place in life where he belongs.
