It

There are movies that draw you in slowly by putting out a single piece of bait, which is then dragged step by step back to some place you don't want to go. The Swimmer is one of those. It's definitely not horror, not even what I'd call a thriller. There's a mystery here, and a deepening feeling that it's all a lie. Think of Blue Velvet, if the whole movie revolved around what caused Jeffrey's father's heart attack. It's also a memorable, brutally sad movie.

You're thinking…what? John Cheever? Not a name associated with great film adaptations. Then again, neither is Frank Perry, who adapted the story with his wife Eleanor, who gets screenwriting credit. But Perry's fascination for dysfunctional families and Cheever's with suburbia came together perfectly. In a landscape where literary adaptations are typically mangled beyond recognition, The Swimmer is both faithful and adventurous.

Granted, with a tale that runs a mere ten pages in The Stories of John Cheever, there shouldn't be much room to go wrong. But most of the dialogue, and many of the film's specific encounters, were invented by Eleanor Perry for the film. She's right on the money the entire time, keeping the tone and intent, but filling out both plot and meaning. There's evidence to indicate that Cheever had either Odysseus or Narcissus in mind when he wrote the story, and Perry's new opening and the film's construction cements it.

Summer fades. Like a lost hero, Ned Merrill appears out of nowhere. He walks straight onto an old friend's estate and jumps in the pool as if he owns the place. No one bats an eye, and a drink is waiting to meet his hand as he rises from the other end of the pool.

This is the beginning of a journey across the wealthy spread of Westchester County. Ned visualizes a crystalline path of water which will take him home. "Pool by pool, they form a river, all the way to our house. I'll call it the Lucinda River, after my wife." For reasons no one can fathom, Ned Merrill wants to swim home.

But the journey isn't as simple as that. Pools mean houses, which mean people. In conversations with old friends and enemies, there's this nagging sensation. He stares off into space and obsesses over the beauty of the day and the water. He's a sleepwalker, totally lost inside himself. We join Ned Merrill as his manufactured reality is in full swing. We don't watch him create the fantasy life, but we sure as hell get to watch it crumble.

The magnificence of The Swimmer is the way that Ned's own story and realizations are married to observations about class and race and what happens when different levels collide. These aren't grand, shocking revelations, but that doesn't make them any less effective. And with every step, Ned moves away from old, 'polite' society and closer to the truth.

Cheever didn't have much sympathy for the plight of the social elite, and neither does this film. In the beginning, the old money families, when faced with Ned's awkward appearance, talk about trivialities. Their hangovers, or the tech specs of a water filter. As he moves on, each encounter reveals more personal details as the people become less polite. The vulgar new rich talk about their money, and then it's broken homes, vaguely antisocial practices and misplaced sexual desire.

Every step of the way, it all traces back to some facet of who Ned is, and what happened to him. When it all comes together, it's nothing less than the American Dream gone totally south. Since he appears out of nowhere, and because so many sequences are touched with the air of dreams, Ned's failure takes on a mythic quality. It's bigger than the fate of a single man.

I feel like if this movie were made today (see below) that there'd be a shocking twist reveal to demonstrate that Neddy isn't all there. But here he comes apart in layers. The Swimmer is a story told in glances and small movements. You'll get as much information out of a couple sideways glances as from any dialogue. Burt Lancaster is brilliant -- golden and muscular at the beginning, then aged and shivering at the climax.

Everything isn't perfect, of course. Here and there, the intentionally oblique photography veers into absurdity, and a few moments are grandly overplayed, more by Frank Perry and the editors than Lancaster. In particular, the conclusion is too grandiose, when a few silent shots would have served perfectly. There are probably even people who'd write off the film, based on the visual style and acting technique, which is so late-'60s pop it almost hurts.

There are also a few moments when Frank Perry and Burt Lancaster seem at odds with one another. That may be part of the reason Perry eventually walked away from the picture, leaving the most intense encounter to be directed by a young Sydney Pollack. (Lancaster was in Pollack's next movie, Castle Keep, which is supposedly the film watched by Ronald DeFeo, Jr immediately before killing his family in a famous Amityville, NY home.)

Those are squabbles, though. I'll go on record as saying this is one of the best marriages of film and prose I've seen. In the spectrum of small, forgotten films, it's huge.

(I hate to even touch on this, but it can't be helped. Rumors have swirled for years about a remake, and they've intensified to the point where Alec Baldwin's name is commonly attached to the film. Shudder.)