He Walks on Water

Tahir Kayani

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Being There  

Hal Ashby 1979

130 Minutes English

Rating: Give It A Miss

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Peter Sellers is like that beloved but embarrassing uncle who’s capable of shouting out smut at the most inappropriate time. Sellers’ humor hasn’t aged well and I now cringe to think that as a child I found The Party and There’s a Girl in my Soup hilarious. The humor is mostly based upon exploiting stereotypes and generally at someone’s expense.
 
Being There is a movie that Peter Sellers wanted made for many years before it actually came to fruition on the back of the Pink Panther success. It was supposed to be the vehicle by which Sellers’ would make the jump from a comic actor to a serious one. And it did fool a few critics, including members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated Sellers for an Academy Award for his role as Chance the gardener in 1980.
 
Being There is the story of the acceptance of an outsider into the very inner sanctums of the Washington D.C power elite. Jerzy Kosinski's screenplay is based upon his book of the same name. Kosinski, a Polish migrant to America, has written a parable, the ultimate immigrant story, of the outsider making good. The viewer is expected to suspend disbelief and accept that Chance is an illiterate gardener, in the employ of a Washington D.C householder. No one knows where he comes from, or why he dresses like an English gentleman complete with a derby and an unfurled umbrella. His education, mannerisms and speech patterns are all, implausibly, owed to watching television . Sellers may not have been able to master a southern accent for Dr. Strangelove but here he manages a neutral American accent rather well. His old employer dies and he is forced out of his home by lawyers representing the estate. Chance wanders about the city and has a gratuitously racist conversation with a group of young black men, where words like “honky” and “asshole” are easily bandied. An accidental meeting with Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of an ailing tycoon and Washington powerbroker, sees him ensconced in her mansion offering his simple homilies to the rich and the powerful. One has to feel sorry for Shirley MacLaine—having to famously play with herself because Chance likes to watch...—and Melvyn Douglas (Ben Rand), fine actors having been cast in such a stinker.
 
I was struck by the parallels between this film and Kosinski’s life: Chance speaks haltingly, because he’s not really sure of the subject, this would be akin to Kosinski attempting to speak English after a childhood of speaking Polish; and there’s a little matter of the Rand widow throwing herself at Chance. Didn’t Kosinski in real life marry the widow of a steel tycoon?