Rainbow with Egg Underneath and an Elephant

Being There

REVIEWS
Monthly Film Bulletin

Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun Times

Leonard Maltin

Being There
USA, 1979
Director: Hal Ashby
MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN
Volume 47, Nos. 552-563
by GILBERT ADAIR

Cert--AA. dist--ITC. p.c--Lorimar. A North Star International picture. In association with CIP-Europaische Trehand AG. exec.p--Jack Schwartzman. p--Andrew Braunsberg. assoc.p/p manager--Charles B. Mulvehill. location manager--Spencer Quinn. ass d--David S. Hamburger, Toby Lovallo. sc-Jerry Kosinski. Based on his own novel. ph--Caleb Deschanel. col--Metrocolor; prints by Technicolor. camera op--Nick McLean. sp ph--Dianne Schroeder. process--Don Hansard. video playback--Louis Mahler, Peter Martinez. "Gary Burns Show" video segment d--Don Mischer. video sequence research/selection-- Dianne Schroeder. ed--Don Zimmerman. ed consultant--Mireille Machu. p.designer--Michael Haller. a.d--James Schoppe. set dec--Robert Benton. m-John Mandel. m.excerpts-"Also sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss, arranged and performed by Eumir Deodata; the works of Erik Satie. cost--Mary Routh; (men) Anthony Faso, Richard Mahoney, (women) Suzanne Grace. make-up--(Peter Sellers) Charles Schram, (Shirley MacLaine) Frank Westmore. title design--Pablo Ferro. titles/opticals-Pacific Title. sd rec--Jeff Wexler. sd.re-rec--Don Mitchell. sup. sd. effects ed--Frank Warner. sd. effects ed--Norval D. Crutcher, Gary S. Gerlich, Samuel C. Crutcher, Victoria Martin. p. assistants--Charles Clapsaddle, Michael Flowers, Gregory Palmer.

l.p--Peter Sellers (Chance), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn Douglas (Benjamin Rand), Jack Warden (President, 'Bobby'), Richard Dysart (Dr. Robert Allenby), Richard Basehart (Vladimir Skrapinov), Ruth Attaway (Louise), Dave Clennon (Thomas Franklin), Fran Brill (Sally Hayes), Denise DuBarry (Johanna Franklin), Oteil Burbridge (Lola, Boy on Corner), Ravenell Keller (Abbaz, Kid with Knife), Brian Corrigan (Policeman by White House), Alfredine Brown (Old Woman asked for Lunch), Donald Jacob (David, Chauffeur), Ernest M. McClure (Jeffrey, Liveryman), Kenneth Patterson (Perkins, Butler), Richard Venture (Wilson, Chance's Valet), W.C. 'Mutt' Burton (Lewis, Doorman), Henry B. Dawkins (Billings, X-Ray Technician), Georgine Hall (Mrs Aubrey, Rand's Secretary), Neil P. Leaman (Constance, Nurse), Alice Hirson (First Lady), James Noble (Kaufman, Presidential Adviser), Timothy Shaner, William F. Williams, William Dance, Jim Arr, and William Lubin (Presidential Aides), Gerald C. McNabb Jnr. (Agent Woltz), Hoyt Clark Harris Jnr. (Agent Riff), Ned Wilson (Honeycutt, Agency), Stanley Grover (Baldwin, Bureau), John Harkins (Courtney, Financial Editor), Katherine DeHetre (Kinney, News Researcher), William Larsen (Lyman Stuart, News Publisher in Bar with Courtney), Jerome Hellman (Gary Burns), Arthur Rosenberg (Morton Hull, Producer of Burns Show), Sam Weisman (Colson, TV Make-Up Man), Fredric Lehne (TV Page, with Glass of Water), Gwen Humble (TV Guest), Laurie Jefferson (TV Reporter), Allen Williams, Janet Meshad and Paul Marin (Other Reporters), Melendy Britt (Sophie), Hanna Hertelendy (Natasha Skrapinov), Elya Baskin (Karpatov, Russian Aide), Thann Wyenn (Ambassador Gaufridi), Richard McKenzie (Rod Stiegler, Book Publisher), Sandy Ward (Senator Slipshod), Danna Hansen (Mrs Slipshod), Mitch Kreindel (Dennis Watson), Villa Mae P. Barkley (Teresa, Nurse), Richard Seff (Dudley, Pallbearer), Terence Currier, Leon Greenberg, Austin Hay, Mark Hammer and Maurice Copeland (Pallbearers).

11,660 ft. 130 mins.

Washington, D.C. Totally illiterate and ignorant of the ways of the world, Chance leads a contented existence tending the garden and watching television in the house of his benefactor, the Old Man. When the latter dies, however, the house is closed and Chance is ordered to leave by the estate's executors. Wandering aimlessly in the streets, he is hit by a limousine and taken home by an alarmed Eve Rand, who lives on a palatial estate with her elderly husband Benjamin, an ailing financier of vast wealth and political influence. Charmed by what he imagines to be Chance's homespun wit and solid good sense, Rand later introduces him to the President, and Chance so impresses them with his invocation of gardening metaphors during a discussion of the economic crisis that he is quoted in a nationally televised Presidential address. Chance becomes a celebrity overnight, his every word judged a nugget of wisdom. his stature grows, moreover, when the FBI, the Washington press and even the Soviet Embassy fail to unearth information about his past. Although Eve's attempts to deepen her relationship with her new friend are fully sanctioned by Benjamin, who envisages making Chance their heir to his industrial empire, they are thwarted by Chance's own inability to respond. When Benjamin dies, his pallbearers - a group of powerful industrialists who are searching for a new Presidential candidate - unanimously settle on Chance as their choice.

Hal Ashby is a curious case of arrested development. Almost alone among directors whose reputations were established during the last decade, he has never progressed beyond stylistic tropes and thematic preoccupations of Sixties film-making at its most modish. His abiding concern with marginals of every hue - oddly akin to that of Herzog, albeit filtered through a roseate West Coast shimmer - is a sympathetic trait, yet it rarely succeeds in discomforting the spectator or challenging him to redefine his perception of normality. Being There is no more astringent in tone - its soundtrack, for example, is a characteristically relaxed medley of cod Satie punctuated by an ironic revamping of the best known theme from "Also sprach Zarathustra" - but here at least the style is totally atone with the muted resonance of Kosinski's amiable fable. Even under tougher direction (one thinks of Polanski), Peter Sellers' hypnotically placid performance would have blunted the edge of what threatens, in any case, to become a rather woolly satire on Washington mores. Chance the Gardener is Ashby's Kaspar Hauser, sallying forth into a world for which he is psychologically and (it is hinted) physically ill-prepared, "short-changed by the Lord" as the black maid Louise succinctly puts it. Ejected from the Garden without ever having tasted of the Tree of Knowledge - the ubiquitous television, to which he is addicted, only serves to multiply the areas of his ignorance - he most plausibly acts as a downer on desire, with the President (a marvellous exercise in restrained drollery from Jack Warden) finding his sexual prowess diminished by his obsession with this amoeba-like being at loose on the political scene. Conversely, the romantic interludes between Chance and Eve, coyly encourage by the dying Rand, quite fail to convince. In the novel, Chance's essence as an unwitting catalyst is wisely never preceded by an existence founded on verbal descriptions of age and physique: since on the cocktail party circuit he is judged attractive, then attractive he must be, and all further speculation is scotched. It is as much a measure of Seller's extended cameo as of Shirley MacLaine's undimmed beauty that their scenes together constitute the narrative's one crucial weakness. The film works better when charting Chance's leisurely but irresistible (in both sense and word) ascension to the White House. Predictable gags abound, as in the cross-purposes conversation with the ambitious young lawyer in the opening sequence, or the assumption that a man without a documented past must therefore be invested with an almost abstract concentration of power. But just as frequently, script (a skilful adaptation by Kosinski himself) and direction manage to squeeze unexpected rewards from the material: Chance, accustomed to being served his meals by Louise, accosting a harassed black housewife in the street and plaintively inquiring about his lunch; Louise, flabbergasted by his appearance on a talk show, sourly observing, "You have to be white to get any place in this country"; and, most endearingly, Chance watching his own performance on television and, as has always been his custom, almost immediately switching channels.
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Being There
US (1979): Comedy
Roger Ebert Review: 4.0 stars out of 4
130 min, Rated PG, Color

There's an exhilaration in seeing artists at the very top of their form: It almost doesn't matter what the form is, if they're pushing their limits and going for broke and it's working. We can sense their joy of achievement—and even more so if the project in question is a risky, off-the-wall idea that could just as easily have ended disastrously.

Hal Ashby's BEING THERE is a movie that inspires those feelings. It begins with a cockamamie notion, it's basically one joke told for two hours, and it requires Peter Sellers to maintain an excruciatingly narrow tone of behavior in a role that has him onscreen almost constantly. It's a movie based on an idea, and all the conventional wisdom agrees that emotions, not ideas, are the best to make movies from. But BEING THERE pulls off its long shot and is a confoundingly provocative movie.

Sellers plays a mentally retarded gardener who has lived and worked all of his life inside the walls of an elegant Washington town house. The house and its garden are in a decaying inner-city neighborhood, but what goes on outside is of no concern to Sellers: He tends his garden, he watches television, he is fed on schedule by the domestic staff, he is content.

Then one day the master of the house dies. The household is disbanded. Sellers, impeccably dressed in his employer's privately tailored wardrobe, wanders out into the city. He takes along the one possession he'll probably need: His remote-control TV channel switcher. He uses it almost immediately; surrounded by hostile street kids, he imperturbably tries to switch channels to make them go away. He hasn't figured out that, outside his garden, life isn't television.

And that is the movie's basic premise, lifted intact from a Jerzy Kosinski novel. The Sellers character knows almost nothing about real life, but he has watched countless hours of television and he can be pleasant, smile, shake hands, and comport himself; he learned from watching all those guests on talk shows. He knows nothing about anything, indeed, except gardening. But when he stumbles into Washington's political and social upper crust, his simple truisms from the garden ("Spring is a time for planting") are taken as audaciously simple metaphors. This guy's a Thoreau! In no time at all, he's the closest confidant of a dying billionaire industrialist (Melvyn Douglas)—and the industrialist is the closest confidant of the president.

This is, you can see, a one-joke premise. It has to be if the Sellers performance is to work. The whole movie has to be tailored to the narrow range within which Sellers' gardener can think, behave, speak, and make choices. The ways in which this movie could have gone out of control, could have been relentlessly boring on the one hand, or manic with its own audacity on the other, are endless. But the tone holds. That's one of the most exhilarating aspects of the joy you can sense, as Ashby pulls this off: Every scene needs the confidence to play the idea completely straight.

There are wonderful comic moments, but they're never pushed so far that they strain the story's premise. Some of them involve: a battle between the CIA and the FBI as to which agency destroyed the gardener's files; Shirley MacLaine unsuccessfully attempts to introduce Sellers to the concept of romance; Sellers as a talk-show guest himself (at last!), and Sellers as the hit of a Washington cocktail party. The movie also has an audacious closing shot that moves the film's whole metaphor into a brand-new philosophical arena.

What is BEING THERE about? I've read reviews calling it an indictment of television. But that doesn't fit; Sellers wasn't warped by television, he was retarded to begin with, and has TV to thank for what abilities he has to move in society. Is it an indictment of society, for being so dumb as to accept the Sellers character as a great philosophical sage? Maybe, but that's not so fascinating either. I'm not really inclined to plumb this movie for its message, although I'm sure that'll be a favorite audience sport. I just admire it for having the guts to take this weird conceit and push it to its ultimate comic conclusion.
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Being There
US (1979): Comedy
LEONARD MALTIN'S MOVIE AND VIDEO GUIDE 1995
Copyright © Jessie Films Ltd., 1994.
Published by arrangement with Dutton Signet,
(a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.)
by LEONARD MALTIN

Director: Hal Ashby
Cast Includes: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard Dysart, Richard Basehart, James Noble, David Clennon
Review
A childlike man (Sellers) chances to meet important, powerful people who interpret his bewildered silence as brilliance. Low-keyed black humor, full of savagely witty comments on American life in the television age, but fatally overlong. Adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his own story. Douglas won Oscar as political kingmaker.
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