Being There (1979)

Directed by Hal Ashby. Starring Peter Sellers, Melvyn Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Richard Dysart, Jack Warden, David Clennon, Fran Brill, Sam Weiseman, Richard Basehart, Than Wyenn, Ruth Attaway, James Noble. [PG]

Modern fable of childishly naïve Chance the gardener (Sellers) is something of a miracle movie in its mastery of tone, craft, pace and humor; it so easily could have fallen into disaster—too bohemian, too maudlin, too much of a put-on, too much tedium in its satire, so gentle that it could float away, too literal to offer equivocal interpretation. Having spent his entire life in the seclusion of a D.C. townhouse, tending to the garden of a wealthy benefactor who has now passed away, Chance is suddenly on his own in the outside world. He’s not alone for long, however, as he soon enters the company of a sickly political kingmaker (Douglas), his wife (MacLaine), and even the President of the United States (Warden), all of whom take Chance’s simplistic statements (mostly about television and gardening) as thoughtful metaphors and piercing insight. Sellers exhibits such a narrow range of emotion, behavior and language (and the conceit is carried through from end to end with so little variety) that it should turn redundant long before the end, but the film instead finds sly new angles on the running joke, sending up insider politics and the idiot box, refusing to strip its sincere rube of his dignity, and achieving an almost perplexing air of profundity that’s as ambiguous as it is eloquent. Sellers is disarmingly brilliant in one of his last roles; Douglas won an Academy Award. Screenplay by Jerzy Kosiński from his own same-named novel. Basehart’s final film.

92/100