Being There (1979)

It's a slow starter. First time I saw it, I remember being somewhat puzzled by the opening, where Chance is revealed as a very retarded middle-aged man, trained as a gardener, who apparantly has reached his full--and extremely limited--potential. He loses his livelihood and his sheltered place to live when "the old man"--his mysterious benefactor--dies, and the lawyers in charge of the estate evict him.

My first chuckle came soon after, when he tried using his TV remote on a mugger, trying to change the experience into something more pleasant; it wasn't until this point in the film that things began to make sense to me.

Throughout the rest of the movie, scene after scene shows 'Chauncy Gardener' as a complete misfit--and highlights how we human beings, in all our frailty, create ourselves and our world through what we decide to believe. When Chancy speaks, his words are mysterious because they are short and puzzling--when those around him try to make sense of them, they take what he says as metaphors, and read wildly profound meanings in his words.

(This leads to Jerzy Kosinski's purpose for writing the novel, to highlight the foolish way people blindly swallow whatever tripe the media--and our politicians--serve up. IMO director Hal Ashby caught Jerzy's intention with this movie even better than the book did.)

At the same time that people read wisdom into his simple words, Chauncy is fully present and honest in the moment, and the other characters--to whom this is foreign--treasure that, even while they completely miss that Chance is totally clueless as to what's really going on (with one notable exception).

The irony is that those people closest to Chauncy are led by the meanings they insert to personal growth and transformation--even, in a performance that won Melvyn Douglas a well-deserved Oscar, acceptance of approaching death, as just another season in the eternal cycle of life.

Other reviews I've read on Amazon villify the walking-on-water scene, at the end of the movie; I believe they completely miss the point.

Chance has, by chance, walked out on a stone quay in the lake, and doesn't even know that he should be drowning. He slowly bends over, inserting his umbrella into the water, and looks at it with some puzzlement; he is once again demonstrating that his total innocence is protected--and he gives the audience the experience that the characters in the movie have, namely, to read into this enigma of a film whatever meaning they choose to see.

This, of course, implies Chauncy is walking on water. Is this intended as a biblical reference? I think not. More likely, it's the director's way of visually depicting the same surreal theme he has been developing throughout the movie: All things are possible to one whose own perceptions and understanding is so retarded and child-like as to believe in both everything and nothing at once. The viewer understands from the movie Chauncy is no one spectacular, a bit retarded intellectually, totally naive, without any formidable experience or understanding in the outside world. It is precisely this lack of merit, his obtuseness, which makes him the perfect foil for everyone he comes into contact with. The others lay their own biased perceptions, understandings, and imaginings onto him, so he is seen as being everything they superficially suppose him to be based on his outward appearance; his suit, his visage, and his mannerisms. He who they see as everything is in actuality nothing. Nothing but the perfect fool.

He succeeds not because of his native ability, but because he has none. He rises to prominence because our culture has become so artificial, so intellectually bankrupt, and so superficial that all anyone around him relates to is his image, his superficial appearance, his innocent charm and lack of self-consciousness. He's a chameleon, the "tabula rasa" they then write the script for. To the dying billionaire industrialist, he's a caring friend, to his wife an erotic tease, to the President, a witty raconteur. When the other characters in the movie overlay their own human foibles and shortcomings into the equation of interacting with him, superimposing their own corrupted values and ideas onto Chauncy's blithe but transparently idiotic behavior, his nonsensical utterances become transformed into clever witticisms, witty, thoughtful and politically adept observations. He is "everyman" precisely because he is no one.

When people no longer ground their perceptions, actions or behaviors on reliable, objective and well-educated abilities to decipher and determine the truth, when they abandon the laws of gravity and chance, they enter into a cultural purgatory bounded chiefly by their own ignorance. They travel at their own peril through a strange and quite unpredictable world filled with artifice and illusion. Such a description also fits the way the world is depicted in the stylized fantasies and superficial plot lines of many mainstream movies, videos and TV.

Unfortunately, the consequence of a steady diet of such palpable nonsense is nothing to laugh about. The use of such superficial and stylized models as guidelines for operating in the real world is becoming much more common. Indeed, we're living in a culture virtually transfixed by simple surface impressions of what things appear to be rather than with what they actually are. Like Chauncy, we walk blithely on the surface of our world, never bothering to look at the dangers in the depths below. Unlike our fearless celluloid hero, though, we cannot necessarily evade the dangers of an incredibly complex and increasingly disintegrating contemporary society by merely ignoring them.

At the surface all shades of subtlety are muted and lost; the rich panoply of shades, colors and hues characteristic of a complex world are stylized into simple pastel monochromes, representing a gauze-filtered replica of a world that's unclear, indistinct, and out of focus. This loss of clarity about the nature of the world and its basic reality leads inevitably to dangerous over-simplifications of complicated realities.

We would do well to remember that ours is a complex, multilayered world; forgetting this fact is a well-documented recipe for social, economic, and political disaster. As George Santayana warned us long ago, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". We must remember that sometimes things are profoundly different from the way they appear, that appearances may often deceive and mislead even the best trained and the most sophisticated eye. We must recognize these negative social forces for what they really are; arbitrary, indifferent, irrational, and profoundly anti-human. Mistaking them for anything less (or more) could be a truly fatal mistake. Perhaps Sellers was trying to tell us something......