Being There (1979)
Country: US
Technical: col 130m
Director: Hal Ashby
Cast: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden
Synopsis:
A reclusive gardener, who has learnt everything he knows from television and his plants, is released into the world by the death of his employer and becomes adviser to the President and lover to the First Lady.
Review:
Jerzy Kozinski's brilliant satire on television is also jointly its director and star's last really good film. It is as deceptively gentle as its protagonist is deceptively profound. He gets to where he does by uttering gnomic observations on the world with directness and sincerity, because his purview is so limited that simplicity is mistaken for allegory. Chance is both television's product and its avatar: he speaks directly to his 'viewers', but his words can be appropriated and diverted from their intended meaning. At the film's conclusion he walks on water not because he is messianic, as the President and his entourage believe, lulled into passive receptiveness by television's glassy stare, but because he has seen it on TV, and like the child that he is, monkey sees monkey does. It is a wicked turnaround by Kozinski, who so far, while damning television for promoting absence of thought, has exalted its product by suggesting that if we were all a bit more like Chance, as with Capra's Mr Deeds, the world would be a better place. This delightfully gentle, yet biting, film was seventies Hollywood's last hurrah before the studios regained control.
Country: US
Technical: col 130m
Director: Hal Ashby
Cast: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden
Synopsis:
A reclusive gardener, who has learnt everything he knows from television and his plants, is released into the world by the death of his employer and becomes adviser to the President and lover to the First Lady.
Review:
Jerzy Kozinski's brilliant satire on television is also jointly its director and star's last really good film. It is as deceptively gentle as its protagonist is deceptively profound. He gets to where he does by uttering gnomic observations on the world with directness and sincerity, because his purview is so limited that simplicity is mistaken for allegory. Chance is both television's product and its avatar: he speaks directly to his 'viewers', but his words can be appropriated and diverted from their intended meaning. At the film's conclusion he walks on water not because he is messianic, as the President and his entourage believe, lulled into passive receptiveness by television's glassy stare, but because he has seen it on TV, and like the child that he is, monkey sees monkey does. It is a wicked turnaround by Kozinski, who so far, while damning television for promoting absence of thought, has exalted its product by suggesting that if we were all a bit more like Chance, as with Capra's Mr Deeds, the world would be a better place. This delightfully gentle, yet biting, film was seventies Hollywood's last hurrah before the studios regained control.
Country: US
Technical: col 130m
Director: Hal Ashby
Cast: Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden
Synopsis:
A reclusive gardener, who has learnt everything he knows from television and his plants, is released into the world by the death of his employer and becomes adviser to the President and lover to the First Lady.
Review:
Jerzy Kozinski's brilliant satire on television is also jointly its director and star's last really good film. It is as deceptively gentle as its protagonist is deceptively profound. He gets to where he does by uttering gnomic observations on the world with directness and sincerity, because his purview is so limited that simplicity is mistaken for allegory. Chance is both television's product and its avatar: he speaks directly to his 'viewers', but his words can be appropriated and diverted from their intended meaning. At the film's conclusion he walks on water not because he is messianic, as the President and his entourage believe, lulled into passive receptiveness by television's glassy stare, but because he has seen it on TV, and like the child that he is, monkey sees monkey does. It is a wicked turnaround by Kozinski, who so far, while damning television for promoting absence of thought, has exalted its product by suggesting that if we were all a bit more like Chance, as with Capra's Mr Deeds, the world would be a better place. This delightfully gentle, yet biting, film was seventies Hollywood's last hurrah before the studios regained control.