Being There
Hal Ashby (1979)
In a town house in Washington DC, a middle-aged man (Peter Sellers) wakes up. The television in his room is already on, with an orchestra playing a Schubert symphony. The man looks briefly at the screen before getting out of bed. He rearranges some potted plants in the room then moves into an arbour, where there are more plants and another television, although this one has bad reception and nothing to see on screen but a juddering snowstorm. Returning to his bedroom, the man switches channels from the orchestra performance to a cartoon show. A woman, also middle-aged, comes in to tell him that their elderly employer has died. She is Louise, the cook, and the man we’ve been watching is Chance, the gardener. Soon afterwards, lawyers in charge of the estate evict him from the property, where he’s lived all his life. Chance leaves the premises. He wears a suit, an overcoat and a bowler hat – hand-me-downs from his late employer. He carries a suitcase and rolled umbrella. He walks down a main road and into the city centre. He stops outside a TV shop where he’s drawn to an image of himself, captured on camera on one of the screens in the shop window. Stepping back from the pavement, Chance is struck by a chauffeur-driven car. He’s not seriously hurt but the woman in the back of the car insists on taking him to her home to recover. Her name is Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine). During the car journey, Eve offers Chance a drink. Unused to alcohol, it makes him cough; when Eve asks his name, he splutters out ‘Chance, the gardener’, which Eve mishears as ‘Chauncey Gardiner’.
That name and Chance’s outfit (his tailored suit is from the 1930s) denote a gentleman of the old school. At least, this is how Eve’s husband, the business mogul Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) immediately sees him. Rand is impressed too by the simple, unassuming words that Chance speaks – so much so that, when he receives a visit next day from the US President (Jack Warden), Rand has Chance sit in on the meeting. In language befitting the job he’s done for many years, Chance tells the President, who is desperate for reassurance on his administration’s economic policy, that ‘As long as the roots are not severed, all is well – and all will be well in the garden’. Chance goes on to say that:
‘In the garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.’
The President instantly transmutes Chance’s gardening insights into political rhetoric. (He appears to write his own speeches.) From this point onwards, Chance’s rise is meteoric. He appears on national television, offering similar words of wisdom. His background is a mystery but Chance soon becomes a popular, respected and highly distinctive figure in the media commentariat. He’s also an increasingly prominent member of the Rands’ household. Ben Rand is a dying man (he has aplastic anaemia); he tells his much younger wife that it would be good for her to become close to Chance. Eve needs no encouragement. Already attracted to Chance, she tries to seduce him. A romantic scene is on the television in his room as she does so; Chance, although he has no sexual experience, responds to Eve by imitating the kissing he sees on the screen. When he tells her that ‘I like to watch’, she thinks he’s admitting a liking for voyeurism rather than television and she starts to masturbate to please him. She doesn’t notice that Chance stops looking at her and transfers his attention back to the screen. Ben Rand dies. The President delivers the address at his funeral but, as they carry Rand’s coffin to its final resting place, his pallbearers – other high-ranking figures in their party’s political hierarchy – agree that, if they are to win the next presidential election, Chauncey Gardiner is the only possible candidate. Chance, meanwhile, wanders round Rand’s estate. He comes to and stops at a lake. He goes a few paces across its surface, pauses, and tests the depth with his umbrella. He continues on his way, walking on water.
Being There was adapted for the screen by Robert C Jones and Jerzy Kosiński, from the latter’s 1970 novella. In the event, Kosiński insisted on being given the sole screenwriting credit (I’ll therefore blame him alone in what follows). The satirical premise of the piece is that the simple-minded Chance, who’s spent his life doing nothing but tending his employer’s garden and watching television, is welcomed as a seer and a breath of political fresh air by a combination of the two elements of his modus vivendi. His horticultural bromides make him a different voice. (I didn’t quite get this since the President immediately hijacks Chance’s words for his own political purposes.) But Chance is also a media and, especially, a television celebrity. The society that Kosiński presents may be weary of conventional political discourse but it’s nonetheless in thrall to what it sees on the TV screen.
Is Chance a tabula rasa or a sponge? It depends, on what is more convenient to Jerzy Kosiński at each point of the script. Chance retains things from television if Kosiński doesn’t want to waste time having him enlightened. His brain is a sieve if his ignorance is judged to help the comedic cause (even though it rarely does). For example, on his arrival at the Rands’ mansion, Chance doesn’t understand what an elevator is, though he must have seen one many times on screen. A bit later on, he isn’t able to use a telephone. The same as-it-suits inconsistency governs his social behaviour. When he says at a society gathering that he can’t read or write, the Washington glitterati are astonished by his candour and assume that he means something profound by these words. Chance is as likely, however, to say something conventionally polite – whenever his doing otherwise would get in Jerzy Kosiński’s way. No one ever comments on the resonance between the sound of Chauncey Gardiner’s surname and his preferred metaphors. The ‘I like to watch’ joke is used twice – one use less would have been one too many. There are things that aren’t followed through. For instance, Louise (Ruth Attaway), an African American, complains to her friends and family that Chance’s rise to public prominence proves there’s one law for WASPS in good suits and another for working-class blacks. Since Louise – unlike the press and television – knows who Chance really is, why doesn’t she try and sell her story? (If the media rejected it this would vindicate Louise’s claims of racism.)
Hal Ashby’s direction makes matters worse. If he had zipped along, the pace would have aligned with Kosiński’s brisk, obvious satire and the film might have been crudely entertaining. But Being There proceeds cautiously, as if the story Ashby is telling was realistic and intricately plotted, and the viewer needed time to assimilate its complexities. The movie is beautifully shot by Caleb Deschanel: the often magical quality of the lighting might be seen as reflecting the viewpoint of Chance – his seeing a freshly-minted world for the first time, outside the walled garden and the box room of his previous life. But this clashes with the film’s tone of caustic condemnation of the world into which he’s moved. Being There’s impression of depth – which a faster-moving, more overtly comical treatment might have lacked – is entirely superficial. It isn’t subtle; it’s just sluggish. Hal Ashby includes a load of TV clips. These are mostly meant to illustrate the vacuity of small-screen fare but come across as filler for a big-screen story that’s very thin.
It’s hard to accept that a society whose minds the noxious influence of television has turned to mush would be enraptured by a drab patrician; or that the likes of Ben Rand and the President would infer from his démodé get-up and good manners that Chance is a man of social and moral distinction. Even if you accept this premise, Peter Sellers’s Chance doesn’t quite fit the bill. One of the few interesting things in Julian Petley’s introduction to Being There at BFI was a reference to Sellers’s appearance on The Muppet Show in 1978, when, Petley said, Kermit encouraged Sellers to ‘just be yourself’ and Sellers replied this would be impossible because, ‘I don’t have a self – I had it surgically removed’. It’s true that the people Sellers created on screen seemed like ingenious confections rather than to draw on an underlying personality. This is most remarkably the case with his work in Stanley Kubrick films – not only playing multiple roles in Dr Strangelove but also in Lolita, where Sellers’s brilliant Clare Quilty, Humbert Humbert’s nemesis, is more a figment of anxious imagination than a human being.
Chance in Being There soon came to be seen as perhaps Sellers’s definitive role – partly because the character is sui generis, partly because it was virtually his last appearance[1]. The performance is certainly striking but Sellers doesn’t suggest vacancy or anonymity: he gives the impression of working to achieve blank simplicity. His quiet, deliberate monotone comes across as odd rather than as an expression of old-world courtesy. (Alec Guinness would have been a better Chance. He was Sellers’s senior by fifteen years but Chance’s age doesn’t matter much in the imprecise satirical frame of Kosiński’s story – and the role was offered first to Laurence Olivier, who was seven years older than Guinness.) Sellers’s strongest moments come when he registers emotion rather than an absence of emotion – for example, when Ben Rand dies and Chance’s eyes fill with tears – and these moments are strong simply because they’re different. There’s occasionally fear in Chance’s eyes too: it’s hard to tell if this is the character’s apprehensions of isolation and emptiness, or the actor’s. Sellers supposedly underwent a crisis of confidence about his ability to play Chance. It would be ironic if – in his last major role, as an empty vessel – he was partly expressing a self that he told a Muppet he no longer had.
Shirley MacLaine does her best to rise above her demeaning role as Eve but Being There livens up only when Melvyn Douglas, as Ben Rand, is on screen. Douglas makes you nearly believe that this shrewd, powerful old man is so scared by the imminence of death that he wants to – has to – find something salvational in Chance. Douglas himself looks ill (he died in 1981) but his timing here is superb. In this role, he also, in effect, makes fun of his own tendency towards pomposity as an actor (in his later years anyway – in Billy Budd, Hud and I Never Sang for My Father). The meeting of Chance, Ben Rand and the President in Rand’s library was the only scene, I felt, in which Being There came to satirical life. Jack Warden is very good: he gives the President an amusingly insecure sense of authority and does fine, split-second double-takes as he listens to Chance. The later bits that illustrate the President’s problems in bed with the First Lady are a crummy idea and seem to belong to a different kind of movie, even worse than Being There.
23 November 2015
[1] Being There was Sellers’s last film released during his lifetime. He died in July 1980, a couple of weeks before the release of The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. Blake Edwards’s The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) comprised entirely scenes shot for earlier Pink Panther films and previously unused.