Once upon a time (the early 1970s), I was mildly amused by a blessedly short novel Being There bylined Jerzy Kosinski.* I saw the movie that Hal Ashby directed from a screenplay credited to Kosinski during its 1979 theatrical release and was impatient with the very slow unfolding of a simple-minded premise. The movie earned the Golden Palm at Cannes, Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas both won Golden Globes, and Douglas a second Oscar for the movie (and Kosinski a BAFTA and a WGA award for adapted screenplay—more "adapted" than Anglophones realized at the time).

"Being There" was Ashby's last success, with a descent into drugs apparently following the string of overrated movies he directed during the 1970s (I have already sliced into the rot of The Landlord and The Last Detail). I am puzzled by the high critical regard for Ashby's 1970s movies, which seem to me each to be a single joke stretched out far too long. Many of them seem to be variants on the same joke: that innocence will be misunderstood in a world filled with cynics and poseurs.

In "Being There," as in "The Last Detail" (and, if I remember, in "Harold and Maude and "Shampoo"), innocence is hard to distinguish from ignorance. The story of "Being There" begins with a gray-haired man (an affectless Peter Sellers) in his pajamas watching television. Soon, he is dressed in expensive clothes sitting around watching tv while waiting for his lunch. It has been delayed by the death of "the old man." The tv addict, called "Chance" by the maid, has spent his whole life in a quite grand house in a decaying D.C. neighborhood. He dusts a vintage car (with flat tires), but has never ridden in a car, never been to a physician or a dentist. This is very hard to swallow, but I find it completely unbelievable that after protecting such a mindless (though polite and pleasant) person for fifty-plus years, the benefactor would have made no provisions in his will for caretaking.

Out on the street for the first time, Chance is hapless but is not relieved of his suitcase or umbrella. (Part of Ashby's inflated reputation was for showing things as they were. Harumph!) While fascinated by seeing himself in a window display of a security camera, he is knocked down by the limousine of Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine). the daughter (or wife?) of a super-rich king-maker and presidential advisor Benjamin Rand.(Melvyn Douglas).

The dying Benjamin mistakes Chance's minimal responses and platitudes about gardening for wisdom and metaphors (and thinks that "Gardner" is Chance's patronym rather than his occupation). Benjamin mistakes vacancy for earnestness and includes Chance in a meeting with the president (Jack Warden). Although discomfited by Chance's lack of deference, the president takes what Chance said about the coming of spring as a metaphor for confidence about an economic rebound. The simpleton goes on a talk show and to a reception at the Soviet embassy and has his confident platitudes interpreted some more. Obviously, overnight celebrity is being satirized, along with presidents' grasping for some "common touch," but there is very little in the movie that I find remotely believable.

The dying tycoon's misperceptions are an exception, because he is letting go of reality and accepting death. Melvyn Douglas is very convincing in the part (and in reality would outlive Sellers and deliver one more exceptional late wintry performance in "Tell Me a Riddle"). Eve is lonely, but her throwing herself at Chance strikes me as entirely male fantasy. It is a demeaning part that I cannot imagine any actress making credible. Shirley MacLaine has no trouble looking needy, but has nothing in the script to develop into a character. Eve is nearly as lobotomized as the mentally deficient Chance. Perhaps because they are playing characters who are skeptical of the empty-headed new pundit, but keep quiet for explainable reasons, I think that Richard Dysart and David Clennon are good (and as the housekeeper who raised Chance, Ruth Attaway has the movie's best line).

And what of Peter Sellers in his last completed movie? Knowing how manic Sellers could be, his flatness seems more like acting than if someone else had been cast in the part, though Sellers's famous and oft-repeated role as Inspector Clouseau also involved endlessly maintaining deadpan obliviousness. (I prefer the sinister turns Sellers delivered under the direction of Stanley Kubrick in "Lolita" and "Dr. Strangelove," and am puzzled by those who consider Chance the gardener his greatest performance.) Perhaps if the movie did not run 130 minutes, he (and it!) would not seem so dull. OK, I note that Peter Sellers could sustain looking glazed through a whole movie... The flubbed takes under the final credits suggest that he was only able to do the flat delivery with many, many takes, so that the monotone was achieved in editing hit-and-many-misses performing.

I have already made clear my view that the movie goes on far too long, driving its single joke into the ground (or out on ice so thin that it is liquid?). Visually, "Being There" looks much better than Ashby's early movies. The scenes go on too long, but the camerawork is fluid. The compositions of the shots are excellent. Much of the movie was shot with wide-angle lenses (reminiscent of Kurosawa), and there are tableaux that look Kubrickian in their frozen elegance. The cinematographer was Caleb Deschanel, whose more recent work on "The Passion of Christ" has received a lot of praise. (He has been nominated for Oscars for lensing The Right Stuff, The Natural, Fly Away Home, and The Patriot.)

Some may find the musical allusions cute. I don't. Trying to change the channels with the remote control he has carried from his original home is amusing the first time (trying to switch from a gang of youths just after leaving home), but gets tiring fast. There is also the frightening suggestion of Messiah-hood at the end that I prefer to regard as just another visual conceit rather than as prophecy. The movie shows people foolishly trying to impute meaningfulness and sense where there is none, and some reviewers do the same thing in reading messages into the movie in general, and the ending in particular.

* In 1982, it was convincingly alleged that Kosinski's "borrowings" from an untranslated Polish novel with the same plot as that of Being There constituted plagiarism and that the harrowing, childhood he portrayed in his memoir The Painted Bird was false. Indeed, Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith contended that Kosinski had conned Americans into regarding him as a writer and that the writing published under his name was mostly the work of others.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age