Mike Nichols's generational comedy. Dustin Hoffman's career-launching lead. The film that helped open the New Hollywood era.
Suburban Southern California, 1967. Benjamin Braddock has just graduated from an East Coast college and returned home to his affluent parents' California house. He is uncertain about his future, vaguely depressed, and the focus of his parents' increasingly-elaborate expectations. Mrs. Robinson — the wife of his father's business partner — initiates a sexual affair with him that proceeds across several weeks. Benjamin then begins, against Mrs. Robinson's increasingly-furious resistance, dating her daughter Elaine. The film tracks the complications across approximately several months.
The third act involves Benjamin's pursuit of Elaine after the Robinsons have arranged her marriage to a more-appropriate suitor. The film's closing sequence — Benjamin arriving at the Robinson wedding ceremony moments after the vows are exchanged, his disruption of the ceremony, his and Elaine's escape on a Santa Barbara bus — is one of the most-quoted sequences in 1960s American cinema. The closing shot, on the bus, shows the two slowly registering that they have escaped the planned future but have not yet decided what to do next.
Mike Nichols won Best Director at the 1968 Academy Awards for The Graduate. He had won Best Director for his debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? two years earlier — making him one of the few directors to win the prize for both his first and second features. The Graduate was nominated for seven Oscars (including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hoffman, Best Actress for Bancroft, Best Supporting Actress for Ross); it won only Best Director.
What the win confirmed was that the New Hollywood generation — directors of Nichols's age and broadly-comparable background — was now the dominant force in American cinema. Nichols was 36 during The Graduate's production; the broader generational shift from the older studio-era directors to younger figures committed to the New Hollywood working approach was, in 1967-1968, structurally underway. The Graduate was one of the films that consolidated this shift; the others were Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the broader cluster of late-1967 releases that pushed mainstream American cinema toward the more-explicit, more-political, more-formally-experimental register that would define the subsequent decade.
Dustin Hoffman was 30 during production but cast as a 21-year-old recent college graduate. The age gap was, in 1967, structurally unusual; Hollywood mainstream casting typically maintained closer age-to-role alignment. Hoffman's specific physical and vocal qualities — the smaller stature, the high-pitched voice, the Jewish-American specifically-non-WASP appearance — made him an unconventional lead for the kind of role that 1960s Hollywood would typically have given to a Robert Redford or a similar tall-WASP-archetype performer.
The casting was, in some sense, part of the film's broader argument. Benjamin Braddock is, structurally, a figure whose inability to fit into the Southern-California-suburban expectation framework is the film's central dramatic engine. Hoffman's specific non-conventional casting reinforced the structural argument; his physical presence as Benjamin signalled to the 1967 audience that the character was not, in any conventional Hollywood-protagonist sense, going to operate within the surrounding social architecture. The breakthrough launched Hoffman's career; he would, across the subsequent two decades, become one of the most-respected dramatic leads in American cinema.
The Graduate's score by Simon and Garfunkel was, in 1967, structurally unusual. Most studio films of the period used original orchestral scores composed for the production; The Graduate used existing pop-folk recordings by an active contemporary musical duo plus one specifically-commissioned new song ('Mrs. Robinson'). The Sound of Silence, Scarborough Fair / Canticle, April Come She Will, and Mrs. Robinson formed the core of the soundtrack.
The structural decision was one of the foundational moves toward what would become standard contemporary practice — the use of existing pop-music recordings as score material rather than commissioned orchestral work. The Simon and Garfunkel record sales the soundtrack produced were substantial; the soundtrack album was certified gold within months of release. The structural argument the film made — that pop-music could carry the dramatic-emotional content that conventional orchestral score had previously delivered — has been extended across almost every subsequent generation of American cinema. The Graduate is, in some sense, the structural starting point for the contemporary needle-drop tradition.