Being There (1979)

Official trailer

Being There is Hal Ashby’s 1979 American satire adapting Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novella. The film depicts Chance, a simple-minded gardener who has spent his entire adult life inside the Washington DC mansion of a wealthy man known only as the Old Man. When the Old Man dies, Chance is forced to leave the property for the first time.

He’s struck by the limousine of wealthy industrialist Ben Rand’s wife Eve, taken to the Rand estate for treatment, and gradually mistaken for a wise economist named Chauncey Gardiner whose simple statements about gardens Washington elites interpret as deep economic and political insights. Peter Sellers plays Chance. Shirley MacLaine plays Eve Rand. Melvyn Douglas plays Ben Rand. Jack Warden plays the President of the United States. Richard Dysart plays Dr. Robert Allenby. Richard Basehart plays the Soviet ambassador. Kosinski wrote the screenplay.

Sellers breaks my heart in this, and I didn’t expect a satire to do that. I laugh at the Washington crowd hanging on every word about gardens, and then I look at Chance’s calm, trusting face and want to protect him from all of them.

United Artists produced the film on a budget of approximately 8 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 30 million dollars worldwide.

The film is the principal late-career achievement of Peter Sellers and one of the classic American satires. Sellers had pursued the role for years and persuaded both Kosinski and Ashby that he could play Chance. The performance combines Sellers’s mimicry skills with restrained character work that his earlier comedic films hadn’t required. Melvyn Douglas won Best Supporting Actor as the dying industrialist who befriends Chance.

The film works as both political satire about how American elites mistake confidence for competence and as meditation on how television viewing has replaced education for ordinary citizens. Sellers received a Best Actor nomination and lost to Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer. He died less than a year after the film’s release. Being There remains his last significant performance.

Sellers as Chance

Peter Sellers plays Chance as a man whose entire knowledge of the world comes from television and gardening. He can’t recognize his own ignorance because he has no way to compare what he knows with what anyone else knows. He speaks in simple sentences about gardens. When the President asks his views on the economy, Chance describes the seasons of growth and decay, and the President hears sophisticated economic metaphor. That exchange is the funniest scene in the film to me, and Jack Warden sells the President’s awe perfectly.

Sellers played the role with real restraint. The actor was known for elaborate comedic transformations across multiple characters. Chance required the opposite approach. The performance succeeds because Sellers doesn’t signal that Chance is a fool. The character is unaware of his own simplicity. Sellers plays Chance with the dignity of someone confident he’s having normal conversations. The dignity allows the satire to work because the audience never feels superior to Chance. The audience feels superior to the elites who mistake him for an oracle.

The Television Education

Chance has spent his entire life watching television. Every situation he encounters, he attempts to resolve by mimicking behavior he’s seen on television shows. He shakes hands when characters on television shake hands. He delivers lines from sitcoms when conversation requires him to speak. The film treats television viewing as Chance’s only education and asks what kind of mind such education produces.

The argument the film makes without stating it is that television has produced Americans whose whole frame of reference comes from the screen. The 1979 exaggeration has become later reality. Multiple American presidents have come from television, and shared cultural reference points now trace mostly to entertainment. I think that idea has aged better than anything else in the film, and it gets less funny and more unsettling with every year that passes.

The Final Shot

In the final scene, Chance walks on water across a pond at Ben Rand’s funeral.

The shot isn’t explained. The audience must decide whether Chance has walked on water through some supernatural quality the character possesses, or whether the shot is symbolic of how Chance moves through American society without its actual conditions touching him. The text supports both readings.

Ashby and Kosinski reportedly disagreed about the meaning of the final shot. The director and screenwriter never agreed on the intended interpretation. The disagreement preserved the ambiguity instead of damaging it. Audiences have continued to debate the ending for decades.

The decision to leave the central question unresolved gave the film a final image that works beyond the satirical content the rest of the runtime established. Multiple interpretations of the closing shot have been published. None is definitive.

The ending was smart to stay unsettled. Chance stepping out onto the water is the most haunting image in the film for me, and I don’t want anyone to explain it.

Does Being There still hold up?

A 9, and Sellers is most of the reason.

Restraint makes him funnier here than any of his famous transformations did, the television satire has turned from a joke into a prophecy, and the walk across the water is an ending I’m grateful nobody resolved. The only thing between it and a 10 is that I wanted more time with Melvyn Douglas’s dying Ben Rand. If you only know Sellers from his elaborate comic roles, this is the one that shows what he could do.

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