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Being There


#373 - Being There
Hal Ashby, 1979



A middle-aged gardener with a developmental disorder is forced to leave the estate he's lived on for his entire life and ends up in the home of an elderly businessman.

Credit where credit's due, Hal Ashby knows how to offer a decent iteration on some familiar tropes, whether it's the "manic pixie dream girl" in Harold and Maude or the "one night on the town" of The Last Detail. Being There plays on the whole "supposedly ingenious fool" trope, with Peter Sellers playing said fool with considerable aplomb. Sellers made a career of being able to inhabit all sorts of humourous characters even in films that were starkly serious, and while Being There does have a fundamentally comical premise, it doesn't go for broad laughs so much as a pointed melancholy even in its most obviously funny moments (such as Sellers' encounter with a street gang or the various reactions to his assertion that he "likes to watch" television). Of course, it's a credit to this film that, despite its apparent comedic nature and lack of spontaneous laughter, it still doesn't feel like a failure. In fact, it's far from it.

While Sellers definitely delivers a performance that more than compensates for the character's familiar developments (it's not hard to feel like he was robbed of an Oscar), credit has to go to the rest of the cast. Melvyn Douglas plays the elderly businessman who takes Sellers in following an accident and admires his tendency towards being straightforward and honest, seeing it as an opportunity to reflect on his own shortcomings and immediate goals, which do involve meeting the president (Jack Warden). Shirley MacLaine is stellar as always playing Douglas's wife who has a number of conflicting feelings about Douglas that are only exacerbated or challenged by Sellers' arrival into their lives. A few other character actors (most noticeably The Thing alumni David Clennon and Richard Dysart as an attorney and doctor respectively). Being There may not exactly deliver hearty laughs and it's disappointing how the film's final image has become iconic to the point that it'd practically spoiled, but it is the kind of warm yet bittersweet film that I've come to expect from Ashby.