New Movies: The Swimmer

"It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, " 'I drank too much last night.' " So begins John Cheever's short story The Swimmer and this picture based on it.

The scene is Eastern exurbia, with its vast, manicured lawns, four-car garages and, most emblematic of the good life, swimming pools. Among those who drank too much is Neddy Merrill (Hurt Lancaster), a fortyish adman. But unlike the commuters who surround him, he nurses no hangover and fights no paunch. One day Merrill inexplicably finds himself eight miles from home dressed only in swimming trunks. Suddenly, obsessed by a strange notion, he decides to take an unearthly route home —by splashing in and out of his neighbors' pools.

Merrill, like Dante, is in the middle of the journey, and the lighted cerulean water becomes his Styx. At one poolside, supposed friends needle him with cruel remarks about his wife and daughters. A stop at another leads him into a party where he finds a piece of family furniture he cannot recall selling. A quarrel with his ex-mistress (Janice Rule) at yet another diving board reveals that he has no memory of their final bitter scene that took place years before. At last, weary and shivering, he finds himself shaking the locked, rusty gate to his house as the rain streaks down. He breaks it, and confronts the dreadful reality that his unmoored mind has been unable to face.

To make a novel-sized picture, Cheever's skeletal story had to be fleshed out. Scenarist Eleanor Perry and her director-husband Frank (who made David and Lisa) have done so by turning the gothic into the baroque. A little boy cannot be a symbol of innocence by himself; he must be playing a pipe like Pan. To give Merrill's mental anguish an exterior, a vanilla-colored, bikini-clad girl companion is added. To increase the audience's anguish, Merrill is made to out his hand on her stomach and quote The Song of Solomon: "Thy belly is like an heap of wheat." The line is difficult enough for any actor to recite, but Lancaster here, as in much of the film, sounds as if he is reading ingredients from a bread wrapper.

There are a few reflections of the acrid, desolate quality in Cheever's original—notably when Merrill is maligned by a series of well-cast bit actors playing the tradespeople and servants he once abused. But, like its main character, the project at bottom is a parody of its essential self. "When you see The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?" ask the ads. The chances are that the viewer will talk to himself during the long, embellished stretches that, sadly, make up most of the film.