Being There (1979)

Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) opens with a man who has never left the house and closes with him walking across a lake. In between, the film performs a quiet autopsy on American political culture. Chance, the gardener, is played by Peter Sellers with a blankness so total it reads as wisdom to everyone he meets. He says nothing about seasons and soil, and Washington hears economic policy. It is a satire of projection, of a country so hungry for reassurance that a man reciting gardening tips becomes a presidential contender. This is not the sort of satire that arrives with a thesis statement and a stack of index cards. It simply watches.

The film's small supply of social commentary is distributed sparingly. Chance's cognitive difference sits at the center of the story, though it is treated as an absurdist blank slate, not a condition to be celebrated or defended. Ruth Attaway's Louise gets one sharp line, telling her friends that whiteness is all a person needs to succeed here, and the film lets it land without comment. The wealthy Rand household and the media that manufacture Chance's reputation take their lumps, but the target is vanity and appetite, not an economic system.

What the film refuses to do is explain itself or instruct us. Ashby and Kosiński keep the sermons off screen. The ending, a submerged platform and a man strolling on water, has been argued over for four decades, and the argument is the point. Melvyn Douglas won an Oscar for his dying patriarch. Nobody in the cast lectures. It remains a rare artifact from a period when a film could be political without being preachy, and could be gentle without being soft. We are unlikely to see its like again.