| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
BEING THERE
Rating: 
USA. 1979.
Director – Hal Ashby, Screenplay/Based on the Novel by Jerzy Kosinski, Producer – Andrew Braunsberg, Photography – Caleb Deschanel, Music – Johnny Mandel, Also Sprach Zarathrusta Arrangement – Eumir Deodato, Makeup – Charles Scram & Frank Westmore, Production Design – Michael Haller. Production Company – Lorimar/Northstar International.
Cast:
Peter Sellers (Chance/Chauncy Gardener), Shirley MacLaine (Eve Rand), Melvyn Douglas (Benjamin Rand), Richard Dysart (Dr Robert Allenby), Jack Warden (The President), Dave Clennon (Thomas Franklin)
Plot: Following the death of his elderly patron, the gardener Chance, who has lived inside the old man’s house all his life, is turned out onto the street by the lawyers. But Chance is a complete innocent who has never been out into the world before. He is accidentally run down by the wife of millionaire Benjamin Rand. Concerned, she takes him home. In Rand’s household, Chance becomes a celebrity when his simple-hearted habits of relating everything to the garden are taken as brilliant metaphors for the economy by the President.
This gentle, clever satire contains the penultimate performance of Peter Sellers who died in 1980. (Sellers’ last effort was the occasionally amusing The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980), which is considered best forgotten by most Sellers fans who prefer to let their memories of the comic genius go out on Being There). And for a man who once claimed that he had no identity outside his roles, this is a fitting if ironical final tribute to Sellers. Jerzy Kozinski’s 1971 novel was already a cult book when Sellers read it and shepherded it into production, bringing on board Kozinski to adapt his own book and the eccentric Hal Ashby, director of hits like Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1974).
Jerzy Kozinski clearly construed the role of Gardener as a perfectly blank existential question mark – the running gag is that Chance reacts to everything with complete innocence and it is what people project onto what he is saying that makes him seem a genius. Peter Sellers steps into the part with the blank emotionality of a newborn child and gives an hysterically deadpan performance. (Some have argued it is the best of all of Sellers’s performances and he received an Academy Award nomination for the part). Hal Ashby directs at a clinically restrained distance with many scenes taking place in wide angles – there’s some wonderfully glacial photography. Some of the deadpan tableaux like Shirley MacLaine’s attempt to seduce Sellers go on and on until an audience lies collectively battered in hysterics on the floor. The matter-of-factly tossed aside ending with Chance casually walking across the water out onto a lake, wherein comes the fantasy element, is always guaranteed to have an audience leaving the theatre debating its meaning.
The making of Being There was later depicted in the Peter Sellers biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
|