No, Meester H, you didn’t miss anything where the tone and temper of the film’s exquisitely-handled shifts are concerned. It’s simply most of us miss how invisibly seminal Mr. Nichols’ definitive direction is.
Of the two truly GREAT Directors of Actors in Amurrican cinema – Elia Kazan and Mike Nichols – having done enough frustrating time under egoholic dictators with that title, we probably prefer the latter than the former as the more masterly (if for no other reason, Kazan was utterly ruthless in getting whatever effect he wanted while Nichols could, and did, arrive at far subtler and substantially explosive results without disrespecting, humiliating or deviously manipulating his collaborators).
No more impressive examples for appreciative extortion exist than the charismatically -complex layers Anne Bancroft reveals –
especially in the lost longing in her exhaustive existenial gaze lamenting her young love of art or the drained canvas of her face once her daughter discovers her dalliance.
It’s entirely too easy (and typically lazy of Amurrican audiences) to paint Mrs. Robinson in the o-too-convenient black-and-white ‘villainous’ overtones that insult the intelligence of both the character and those creatively channeling her.
Much like the film itself, which remains uncommonly mature in the finest European sense for such a mainstream Hollywood enterprise …
