SWEET MOVIE :: Being There
BEING THERE1979, starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine
directed by Hal Ashby
Buy from Amazon (I will receive a small remuneration).
So lately I've been watching more movies, not that it's been all that great. With the exception of "All the President's Men" (which, to its fault, ties up the whole movie with a series of teletype news bits), they've all been pretty much middle of the road, above average at best.
"But Dusty," you'll say, "you don't know the first thing about movies." That's where you're RIGHT! But I still get to have an opinion, and my opinion is that it's way more fun to watch season one of The Wire than any half-dozen of these murky 70's-era movies, with their cloudy endings and their tortured, confused protagonists. Bah!
Oh, but wait... I forgot to update my Netflix queue and "Being There" showed up at my door, which I added months ago in a fit of Peter Sellers enthusiasm. Aw, heckfire, I don't want to spend the weekend watching some downer movie. Oh well, I thought, and popped it in over dinner tonight (Totino's Party Pizza, flavor: Combination). Almost from the very first second this movie was ...
...
Gosh, what's the word? I want to say "riveting," but that's not quite right, although I was definitely riveted right away. There's something ineffably magnetic about watching Peter Sellers do anything, but watching him do nothing was instantly, well, riveting. Seriously. Sellers plays Chance, the ostensible gardener for a man at least wealthy enough to afford two servants, albeit a newly dead man when the movie opens. Chance apparently has the mental faculty of a boy, even if it's a friendly, incredibly polite boy. He seems to focus only on his duties and the profusion of televisions littering his employer/caretaker's home.
Let me pause here to mention that I've only watched the first 35 minutes of the movie. I was enjoying it so much that I stopped the movie so I could think about it. There was so much good stuff going on that I started to feel like I was missing things. I've always been a slow thinker, but I'm a THOROUGH thinker as well. So please don't post anything that will ruin anything for me.
One of the other reasons I stopped was to try and draw a scene--Peter Sellers' face is preposterously hard to draw, especially in this role. And it was while trying to draw him that I realized what was making the movie so fascinating: it was of course Peter Sellers himself. I wonder if ANY other actor could have inhabited and animated this role in the same way. Sellers' face is both immobile and extraordinarily expressive; constantly sad-seeming without ever appearing morose. The movie (at least the first 35 minutes of it) are squarely focused on HIM, the character. The story is sort of flimsy, and seems almost an afterthought to the main idea of GETTING THIS CHARACTER ACROSS.
The scene above, in which "Chance", when confronted with a switchblade, pulls out his remote control and tries to "click" the offender away, perfectly sums up the sort of confusing state he finds himself in, having left the house for the first time in his life. He leaves his tidy garden and collection of televisions behind, stepping out the front door of the house into a rundown, trash-strewn neighborhood. All this to the tune of that INCREDIBLY funky 70's version of "Thus Spake Zarathustra". Moments later, confronted with his first ever threatened violence, he of COURSE goes to switch the channel.
Another reason to stop watching for awhile: I found myself focusing A LOT on how much of the movie I thought wouldn't work if someone else did it. I can see someone like Jim Carrey doing this sort of thing now, but hamming it all up Truman Show -style. What makes Sellers' performance so beautiful is precisely how understated it is. Instead of adding mannerisms, behavioral tics, or idiosyncrasies, he REMOVES them. Instead of trying to explain everything going on his character's mind, he explains nothing. The result is hard to explain--in retrospect it occurs to me that by making his character as blank as possible, he allows space for the audience to inhabit that character. To not only witness his confusion at the strangeness of the world, but to FEEL it. When he is captivated by his own image on a storefront television, captured by a videocamera in plain view, you instantly feel his amazement, to suddenly be ON television. Of course he has no conception of the camera--it may have never occurred to him that someone makes all the television he has watched all of his life.
Man, I'm rambling on. But this movie is a good, maybe a great movie. Peter Sellers is incredible. Also, Peter Sellers is impossible to draw--you just can't catch that blank, empty, but somehow lively look in his eyes. Go on, try! I dare you! I'll watch some more tomorrow and let you know what I think. I know you can't wait!
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