Simple-minded gardener Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. home of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run-in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of Eve and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.... (Full plot summary below)
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Simple-minded gardener Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. home of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run-in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of Eve and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.
Leave your thoughts about Being There.
| Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertIt's a movie based on an idea, and all the conventional wisdom agrees that emotions, not ideas, are the best to make movies from. But Being There pulls off its long shot and is one of the most confoundingly provocative movies of the year. |
| Flipside Movie EmporiumRob VauxEverything Forrest Gump should have been and wasn't. |
| Video-Reviewmaster.comSteve CrumBrilliant Ashby classic, Peter Sellers' best. |
| Groucho ReviewsPeter CanaveseWhether Being There is an indictment of our narrow view of the world, a celebration of empty-headedness or all of the above, "Life is a state of mind," and Ashby's film is a gift to treasure. [Blu-ray] |
| Tim Dirks' The Greatest FilmsTim DirksBeing There (1979), subtitled "a story of chance," is a provocative black comedy -- a wonderful tale that satirizes politics, celebrity, media-obsession and television. |
| The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsBeing There finds humor in the way Sellers becomes a blank screen on which people project their expectations. But it also finds value in his simplicity, which might seem like a lot of New Age hokum if not for Sellers' disarmingly quiet performance. |
| NewsweekDavid AnsenA delightfully dark comedy that, despite a cynical bent, offers viewers a good time. |
| Slant MagazineBudd WilkinsElegiac and yet ruefully funny, Hal Ashby’s Being There is at once a profoundly philosophical fable about how we become truly human only in the face of our ineluctable mortality, as well as an incensed satire intent on skewering the mass media’s unhealthy sway among the corridors of wealth and power. |
| Washington PostGary ArnoldSellers's performance—as the innocent neuter figure who rises accidentally to political power on the strength of vacant homilies—is remarkable. But Ashby's direction is marred by the same softness that made The Last Detail and Coming Home so morally bland. |
| Chicago ReaderDave KehrThe director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight. |
