Being There will get you thinking about what it means to be taken in by television, as well as the government, and the better (or lesser) intentions of people in power, and works on more than one level. It's a pure slice of oddball life, the story of a man who got more than likely tucked away into some kind of perfunctory manner by the only things in life with any significance being television and gardening. No more or less. How does one end up living out in the world, however, if this is all there is for the span of a long life?
Jerzy Kosinski's idea is to place this fragmented, polite but assuredly clueless fellow where double standards rule the day. He meets a businessman after a limo accident, and by his outward appearance seeming to fit a certain mold he takes him in. The man is connected in his dealings, all the way up to the president, as an adviser. All Chance (Peter Sellers) can do is say what he knows- not only does he not know lies or how to lie, he's been sort of conditioned, in a way, to not fully comprehend good and evil either. But his words carry meaning, somehow, and he becomes a celebrity all the while not really connected to what's going on. Rarely before has detachment and the subtleties of the human condition been this engaging.
There are three major factors for this, which is the control of wit and truth in the screenplay by Kosinski, who won't go for the cheapest laughs or too mocking in satirical form, but in the moments of dead-pan exchange and the bluntness of Chance's character. Sellers, of course, is at the very top of his game, and that's a first factor, along with the rest of the excellent cast (MacClaine is maybe at her best, as I've not seen too much that wowed me until now; Douglass gives a compassionate performance that speaks to the issue of illness and the end of existence; Warden is surprisingly adept at playing a flabbergasted, weak-willed president).
He leads it as if going for something that seems like it shouldn't be interesting. It's a guy who doesn't really have much expression, aside from some bits of joy, like meeting the president, or in becoming (somewhat) part of MacClaine's character's love-life, or in seeing someone die. But even then it's a muted, half-way expression, and the repression that Sellers makes real here is staggering. The term 'comfortably numb' popped in my head once or twice regarding Chance the gardener, and Sellers makes this as real as possible, and sometimes as funny as possible, but for the most part it's his most mature work where there isn't any cheating- what you see, with his mind transmogrified by TV forever- is what you get.
Ashby, meanwhile, makes this a very successfully directed film by putting a tone to the picture that is not really like the Chance character because you want to see where he goes next. He'll put in a sequence that is hysterically funny, like when Chance is in the limo watching the Cheech and Chong bit Basketball Jones, or in Chance's reaction to pure sexual advances from MacClaine, or in several little things. But he also makes it on a bedrock of a level of plausibility, at least in some part. It's doubtful if a man would have this sort of effect on a mass public, once appearing in public anyway, and have his words 100% to heart, because there would be over-analysis and eventually a crack in the whole character's intent that gardening tactics are universal.
And yet it's even more plausible, however, to see what effect words do have when taken out of context AS the context, and how perceptions in America create more than what one might bargain for, and eventually become a mantra of sorts. That Chance also is quite a dim fellow- not a dimwit exactly, he's not necessarily stupid- brings some extra resonance in the political swamp of today.
Ashby times all of this as though he were certain when to just let the everyday come in as something more. He puts in great musical choices, and a few very memorable images (I loved the shot of Chance walking on the middle-road to the Capital building), and crowns it with a screenplay that doesn't, unlike TV for Chance, take things too simple. Not that there isn't almost a silent-film whimsy to this all, but there's so much to Being There that it will stick with you for many days afterwords.
Jerzy Kosinski's idea is to place this fragmented, polite but assuredly clueless fellow where double standards rule the day. He meets a businessman after a limo accident, and by his outward appearance seeming to fit a certain mold he takes him in. The man is connected in his dealings, all the way up to the president, as an adviser. All Chance (Peter Sellers) can do is say what he knows- not only does he not know lies or how to lie, he's been sort of conditioned, in a way, to not fully comprehend good and evil either. But his words carry meaning, somehow, and he becomes a celebrity all the while not really connected to what's going on. Rarely before has detachment and the subtleties of the human condition been this engaging.
There are three major factors for this, which is the control of wit and truth in the screenplay by Kosinski, who won't go for the cheapest laughs or too mocking in satirical form, but in the moments of dead-pan exchange and the bluntness of Chance's character. Sellers, of course, is at the very top of his game, and that's a first factor, along with the rest of the excellent cast (MacClaine is maybe at her best, as I've not seen too much that wowed me until now; Douglass gives a compassionate performance that speaks to the issue of illness and the end of existence; Warden is surprisingly adept at playing a flabbergasted, weak-willed president).
He leads it as if going for something that seems like it shouldn't be interesting. It's a guy who doesn't really have much expression, aside from some bits of joy, like meeting the president, or in becoming (somewhat) part of MacClaine's character's love-life, or in seeing someone die. But even then it's a muted, half-way expression, and the repression that Sellers makes real here is staggering. The term 'comfortably numb' popped in my head once or twice regarding Chance the gardener, and Sellers makes this as real as possible, and sometimes as funny as possible, but for the most part it's his most mature work where there isn't any cheating- what you see, with his mind transmogrified by TV forever- is what you get.
Ashby, meanwhile, makes this a very successfully directed film by putting a tone to the picture that is not really like the Chance character because you want to see where he goes next. He'll put in a sequence that is hysterically funny, like when Chance is in the limo watching the Cheech and Chong bit Basketball Jones, or in Chance's reaction to pure sexual advances from MacClaine, or in several little things. But he also makes it on a bedrock of a level of plausibility, at least in some part. It's doubtful if a man would have this sort of effect on a mass public, once appearing in public anyway, and have his words 100% to heart, because there would be over-analysis and eventually a crack in the whole character's intent that gardening tactics are universal.
And yet it's even more plausible, however, to see what effect words do have when taken out of context AS the context, and how perceptions in America create more than what one might bargain for, and eventually become a mantra of sorts. That Chance also is quite a dim fellow- not a dimwit exactly, he's not necessarily stupid- brings some extra resonance in the political swamp of today.
Ashby times all of this as though he were certain when to just let the everyday come in as something more. He puts in great musical choices, and a few very memorable images (I loved the shot of Chance walking on the middle-road to the Capital building), and crowns it with a screenplay that doesn't, unlike TV for Chance, take things too simple. Not that there isn't almost a silent-film whimsy to this all, but there's so much to Being There that it will stick with you for many days afterwords.