BEING THERE :: Part Two
BEING THERE1979, starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine
directed by Hal Ashby
Buy from Amazon (A short parade will be thrown in my honor).
So last Saturday I wrote briefly about the movie Being There. I was so excited about the movie that I stopped about a half-hour into it just to SAVOR what I'd seen. I've been a fan of Peter Sellers since I was a kid, when I thought that the Pink Panther movies must certainly be the pinnacle of comedy in our times. And the adult in me has enjoyed his weird turns in movies like Dr Strangelove
, Lolita
, and The Mouse That Roared
. But neither adult me nor kid me were prepared for how incredibly RIGHT a somewhat older Peter Sellers would be in this movie. In fact, he was so perfect that I'll stop describing how good he was, and fall back on the fact that I stopped watching a movie 30 minutes in out of SHEER DELIGHT.The basic shape of the movie is that Peter Sellers plays a man named Chance, a gardener for a rich man who has just died. Apparently Chance has never left the house, and while his relationship to the dead man is never explained, I get the feeling that they were related. Chance is apparently mentally handicapped in some way, although not so much like Rudy or Corky or whatever. While childlike, he never seems childish; never petulant, never selfish (except when concerning television). He seems less broken than empty. You slowly get the idea of this emptiness as the story progresses--for instance, when he leaves the house--for the first time in his life--he begins asking black women on the street for meals, thinking of the maid in the rich man's house who fed him each day.
Peter Sellers does a fascinating thing in this movie. I've always thought of him as as an actor in supreme control of his body, able to use it as much as his face and voice to inform a role. Of course he's famous for physical histrionics like those of Inspector Clouseau or Dr Strangelove. But what's so RIVETING about his performance in Being There is that he almost does the opposite--if anything, he's completely empty as Chance the gardener. The first hour or so of the movie is this empty cipher of a man moving through increasingly chaotic and confusing scenery. I was totally captivated just watching him move around, occasionally interacting with people, all of whom were left inevitably befuddled by said interaction. All but Chance the gardener.
There were numerous points in the first half of the movie where I really felt I was watching one of the best movies I'd ever seen. Chief among these was the moment when Chance leaves the house--the inside of which is presumably well-appointed, although most everything is covered in sheets and drapery. But when he leaves the house, we find that the front door opens onto a shabby, trash-strewn neighborhood, as the funkiest version of "Also Spake Zarathustra"--well heckfire, just watch it yourself:
The clip above closes with what to me is the end of the first part of the movie, and around where I turned the TV off last Saturday. Chance, whose every moment not gardening is spent in front of a television, is captivated by a store-window's large television, which is connected to a videocamera.
The problem with this movie (for me) is that this is probably the emotional climax of the entire film, at around the 34 minute mark. Essentially the first half-hour is a very well-made sort of tone poem of a movie, very focused, very good at depicting a man who moves gracefully through a world he does not understand any more than he needs to. Everything is in its place, there is no wasted footage, so wasted words. Best of all, everything is so open-ended--like the performance of Peter Sellers, a cipher--that you can't help but fill it with your own ideas, your own reactions and suspicions. When the rest of the cast enters the movie, after Shirley MacLaine's limo backs into Chance's leg, this openness fades and finally disappears into a more standard (although still well-made and affecting) political metaphor.
It's not that I'm not interested in politics or the man-vs-society or man-vs-government ideas in Being There, it's just that-- hold on, it is that I'm not interested. I certainly have my own political ideas, but they are almost always external, and rarely do they ever have anything to do with art. I like to think that my imagination has both breadth and depth enough that I would eventually arrive at some of these ideas myself, and for me the political milieu of the movie doesn't add a bit to the impact of its ideas.
Again, it's not that it's terrible or anything--I still enjoyed it mostly through the end. But for me the movie was ABOUT Peter Sellers as this empty gardener. It was ABOUT Peter Sellers himself, his performance--he was riveting in the same way that Marlon Brando or Orson Welles could be riveting in even the worst movies. When the movie became about how goofy rich people and politicians are, and/or how even the most powerful of men draw their ideas from the most foolish of places--well, DUH.
I am learning that the best art leaves room for its audience's ideas. Without the room to interact with a piece of art, to puzzle through the layers of artifice and craft that a person has wrapped their idea in--to participate with the art--then it is merely communication. But when you have the room not only to interact with a piece of art, but to do so in many different ways, and over years and years--well, that's the stuff that lasts, I thin k.
All the same, I liked Being There. I think this movie is worth owning, although I wouldn't put it at the top of my list. I've been thinking a lot about buying all the Star Wars
movies on DVD lately, if that tells you anything about how much credence to put in my ideas about art.
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