Being There

Being There; tragicomedy / satire, USA, 1979, D: Hal Ashby, S: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard Dysart, Richard Basehart, Ruth Attaway, David Clennon, Denise DuBarry, Melendy Britt

Chance lives and works inside a secluded garden in Washington. He was born there and never left the estate. It is implied that he is mentally handicapped. He likes watching Television and is surrounded by only two people; Louise, an old maid, and a nameless old man. Chance would not mind if he spent the rest of his life like that, but one day the old man dies and the estate has to be closed and evacuated. After two lawyers convince him to leave, Chance complies—for the first time in his life he sets a foot in the outside world. He wonders the streets aimlessly until he proves one old maxim, namely how even ordinary people can once in their lifetime stumble into one giant "lucky streak": Chance is namely slightly hit by a limousine of a wealthy woman, Eve Rand. As an apology, she brings him to her home, a gigantic mansion equipped with doctors who examine his injury. There he also meets Benjamin, Eve's dying husband who is still an influential lobbyist. Benjamin does not realize Chance is retarded—he is fooled by Chance's elegant clothes and impeccable manners, interpreting his every childish sentence as a metaphor. Soon the US President spots that Benjamin, his close friend, has a high opinion about Chance. So he joins him. Others follow suit. Soon, Chance is a media star and every celebrity or politician interprets his strange behaviour as a "genius". Eve falls in love with him. And after Benjamin gets even more sick, the politicians discuss placing Chance as the next US President.

In one episode from the animated TV show "Daria", "Speedtraped", there is a scene where Jane is in prison, doing a tattoo to a female criminal with a pen. At one point they start debating about art, and Jane states; "I'm simply posing the question, what if an eggbeater is considered great art on Mars; would that make it art to us?" Truly, what makes art meaningful? What makes a day meaningful? What makes a life meaningful? What is actually the definition of meaning? And what if something, not just art but everything in life, is considered meaningful by one person and meaningless by another? This is one theme of Hal Ashby's "Being There"; the other being how the masses with empty lives simply long for idols to follow, and find them even in wrong people. Praise has to be given to the shining, multi-layered screenplay by Jerzy Kosinski based on his own novel (and possibly an earlier novel, "The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma" by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz) that handles the theme of perfection, and shows that the only way perfection works is that people all have their own personal projection of a suggestive appearance (Chance). The film, which is almost an anti-drama, revolves around one of the most unlikely heroes of any story—Chance, a middle-aged gardener. In a way, Chance is anti-human, actually beyond human; he does not have a wife, kids, job, family, money, friends, he never left his estate and thus has virtually no contact with the outer world... and he doesn't care. He is happy nontheless. In lot of movies, a hero starts with being unhappy and after a lot of adventures finds his happiness. But in this movie the hero is in perfect satisfaction from the start until the finish.  

"Being There" is a masterpiece because it dares to question the criteria for value—it's a story about success. Nobody cared before about Chance, all until Benjamin and the President elevated him, and this gave Chance the illusion of success: suddenly, people follow him, take note of his every word, regard him with respect, because they want some of his success to be shared with them. The characters in the film are smart, wealthy and powerful, but do not know how to be happy, while Chance is not smart, but knows how to be happy without anything because he is free of desire and acts like Nietzsche's "Free spirit", being, in a strange way, superior to them and simply independent. But although the film's messages are serious, the movie itself presents them in a light, albeit funny way, and Peter Sellers, after leaving the low humor of many of his comedies, is unbelievable as the main protagonist and probably gave the role of his career, a one that's so charming that could convert even his biggest hater. In one of the funniest subtle scenes, Chance is in a talk show responding to the state of the economy by telling how "After the winter, there is spring. Some plants grow better in the light while others in the dark". Before a TV show interview, a man tells him: "Do you realize that more people will be watching you tonight, than all those who have seen theater plays in the last 40 years?" It's hard to analyze this film without mentioning its ending. In the last scene, the 'detached' Chance is walking around the Rand's estate, observing the nature. He stops when he reaches the edge of a lake. And then the stagerring ending sets in. Some would interpret that the whole film is a satire on religion and any ideology; some that it is a sad fact that people only see what they want to see and never realize the truth; some that it is about misunderstanding. The last words in the film are "Life is a state of mind". This concludes the film's theme—there is no idealism. An idealistic Chance does not exist, and neither does anything people idealize as perfection. It is disturbing, this human need to find, invent and follow idols even when there are none, in this giant satire on 'cognitive dissonance'. Everything in life is only as important as people's mind percieved it to be—maybe the movie is saying that we should not be shaped by (empty) popularity contest alone, but that we should be more critical of some trends and their contradictions, and reach scientific objectivity.

Grade:++++