The Swimmer

Directed by Frank Perry, The Swimmer follows Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill as he reflects on his life while swimming through a series of pools in his neighborhood. It’s a spare premise that’s employed to erratic yet sporadically rewarding effect by Perry, as the filmmaker, working from a screenplay by Eleanor Perry, delivers a deliberately-paced drama that’s been suffused with a whole host of off-kilter and downright avant-garde elements – which, when coupled with an ongoing absence of context, ensures that The Swimmer is rarely able to make the powerful, engrossing impact that Perry has obviously intended. There’s little doubt, then, that the picture’s mild success is due almost entirely to Lancaster’s mesmerizing and deeply committed turn as the tortured central character, as the actor’s sterling work here goes a long way towards grounding the proceedings even through its more overtly oddball and whimsical stretches. (What, for example, are we to make of the sequence in which Ned and another character frolic through an equine-agility course?) And although the movie concludes on a headscratching and somewhat anticlimactic note, The Swimmer, which is punctuated by a handful of admittedly spellbinding interludes (eg Ned’s emotional encounter with a former lover), ultimately comes off as a very-much-a-product-of-its-time endeavor that benefits substantially from Lancaster’s consistently captivating performance.

**1/2 out of ****