"The Swimmer" was released in 1968, the same year as another highly controversial film that went on to be considered a masterpiece. Whether "The Swimmer" is even a competent (let alone good) film is questionable.
It //is// a profoundly annoying experience. It isn't that we're not sure what's going on (or why), but that the acting is loud and overwrought, and Perry's direction is pretentious, failing to create a "matter of fact" atmosphere needed at the start to draw us into the story.
The story is a widely anthologized work by John Cheever. It suffers from heavy-handed metaphor (eg, Merrill being chased from the public swimming pool for not having an ID tag). But it is, overall, restrained enough and short enough that it's easy to forgive Cheever. (We should be grateful that, after making 150 pages of notes, Cheever condensed them into a short story.)
It's not easy to forgive the director's wife, who wrote the clumsy screenplay. Everything important in "The Swimmer" happens in the protagonist's mind. This sort of story doesn't translate well to film, requiring far too much verbal exposition (rather than character interaction). And the film doesn't show the progression of the seasons (and Merrill's apparent weight loss) that suggest Merrill is not experiencing "reality".
The short story pretty much "works", with a fairly obvious meaning. By converting thoughts into images, the film becomes too literal to reproduce the short story's effect. It would have worked better as a 50-minute "Twilight Zone" episode.
It //is// a profoundly annoying experience. It isn't that we're not sure what's going on (or why), but that the acting is loud and overwrought, and Perry's direction is pretentious, failing to create a "matter of fact" atmosphere needed at the start to draw us into the story.
The story is a widely anthologized work by John Cheever. It suffers from heavy-handed metaphor (eg, Merrill being chased from the public swimming pool for not having an ID tag). But it is, overall, restrained enough and short enough that it's easy to forgive Cheever. (We should be grateful that, after making 150 pages of notes, Cheever condensed them into a short story.)
It's not easy to forgive the director's wife, who wrote the clumsy screenplay. Everything important in "The Swimmer" happens in the protagonist's mind. This sort of story doesn't translate well to film, requiring far too much verbal exposition (rather than character interaction). And the film doesn't show the progression of the seasons (and Merrill's apparent weight loss) that suggest Merrill is not experiencing "reality".
The short story pretty much "works", with a fairly obvious meaning. By converting thoughts into images, the film becomes too literal to reproduce the short story's effect. It would have worked better as a 50-minute "Twilight Zone" episode.