Sellers is terrific
“Being There” is such an elegantly made portrait of a gentle man that I also forget it’s a satire. I think something that’s gotten confusing with Hal Ashby’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel over the decades is that I wonder if we were originally supposed to sympathize with the main character or even embrace his human side at all. He’s such a blank slate, an easy person to pin whatever answer, opinion, or what have you, on. But there’s also something else about Chance- maybe a lesson about living without regard to the rabble and gossip that we’re inundated with just by listening to the news or going on social media. The man is a dummard, but he’s the kind of dummard i’d like to be.
That so many have tried to pin an autism diagnosis on this character over the years also seems to humanize him more than Ashby originally intended. His name is Chance, and he’s brilliantly played by Peter Sellars. He is a very detached man who spends his days tending the garden of a Washington home or watching television, aping much of what he sees on TV in what feels like a strange way broaden himself.
For he has spent his entire life inside this home, never deviating from a schedule or doing common things like riding in a car, or even seeing what the world has to offer. So schematic is his life that when his master dies and the black maid moves on, Chance still believes life will proceed as normal. It’s only when the lawyer comes with the eviction notice that Chance realizes he will have to venture out on his own for the first time.
The world outside the townhouse is unexpected, even for us. The inside is so well managed we hardly ever expect the homeless and urban decay that greets him, and neither does he. Being confronted by some inner city black kids, they immediately start talking jive to him and Sellars plays the fish out of water scene with imperceptible stone-facedness, not even trying to comprehend and even whipping out and pressing off on his trusty remote control to make them go away.
Can there really be much chance for Chance to make it on his own? We wonder but only for a short time as this is America, where being an idiot doesn’t automatically exclude you from failing upward. First get his leg run over by a limo, he winds up recuperating at the estate of the Rands: Ben (Melvyn Douglas), a former titan of industry whose long since left the common man and now bends the ear of the President of the U.S.A (Jack Warden) in making policy, and also Ben’s wife Eve (Shirley MacLaine), who has been less than intimate with anyone since Ben was diagnosed with a blood disorder. She finds beguiling and at times begins a dance of seduction.
She’s not the only one. Chance begins to intermingle with these high society people, although that’s not really the word for it. Smartly dressed in his master’s old suit, he’s mistaken for one of them and so when he sputters nonsense about gardening, many within the inner circle begin to believe he is talking in metaphor, hanging political truisms on his every word like what he said is profound when in fact it’s nonsense.
And that’s the film’s joke right there though it takes on a broader meaning. All these Washington insiders studying the machinations, gossip, approval ratings, and so on are so up their own asses that they’ve long since stopped being able to listen to what the common man is actually saying any more. Looking natural and seeming smart is far more important than actually being it. One of the film’s best gags centers on such: the black maid, after seeing Chance on the news and how much stock these political figures are putting into every asinine thing he says, erupts with a diatribe of how great it must be to be white in America.
The whole thing is pretty comical, from the President using Chance’s gardening metaphors in a speech, to everyone trying to figure out who he is and, when finding nothing, believing he may be FBI or CIA, to Eve attempting her seductions, all while the man watches “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood” or tries standing on his head while she attempts to pleasure herself to get him aroused, cause he’s just told her “I like to watch”
It works as well as it does because of Sellars, who is so easy-going, so sweetly unassuming, and so even-toned as to border on constantly relaxed. You can see some of the performances this influenced, from Tom Hanks in “Forrest Gump” to Kevin Kline in “Dave”. Chance is such a gentle, simple-minded, sincere man that you don’t so much take the joke to be at his expense so much as him being a bit like “Borat”, another influence, letting these people slowly reveal themselves for the self-absorbed dunces they are.