Being There

Chance, a simple gardener, has never left the estate until his employer dies. His simple TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity.

• Director: Hal Ashby
• Genre:Comedy / Drama
• Runtime:130 minutes

Cast

Peter Sellers : Chance
Shirley MacLaine: Eve Rand
Melvyn Douglas : Benjamin Turnbull ‘Ben’ Rand
Jack Warden : President ‘Bobby’
Richard Dysart : Dr. Robert Allenby

Chance (Peter Sellers) is a middle-aged man who lives in the townhouse of a wealthy man in Washington D.C. Chance seems very simple-minded and has lived in the house his whole life, tending the garden, with virtually no contact with the outside world. His cultural and social education is derived entirely from what he watches on the television sets provided by the “Old Man,” who raised him. The only other person in his life is Louise, the maid who cooks his meals and looks upon him as nothing more than a child who has failed to grow up. When his benefactor dies, Chance is visited by attorneys handling the estate. They force him to leave his sheltered existence and discover the outside world for the first time.

He wanders aimlessly through a wintry and busy Washington in old-fashioned clothes, a homburg hat, suitcase, umbrella and a television remote from his old home. However, although finely-tailored many years ago, his clothes are of the style which has now come back into fashion during the period of the story, and so he is presumed to be an expensively, well-dressed man of means by those whom he encounters. In the evening Chance comes across a TV shop and sees his own image in one of the TVs captured by a camera in the shop window. While watching himself in it he is struck by a car owned by Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), a wealthy businessman.

Rand’s wife Eve (Shirley MacLaine) invites Chance to their home (the famous Biltmore Estate doubles as the Rand Estate) to recover from his injured leg. After being offered alcohol for the first time in his life, Chance coughs over it while being asked his name which, instead of “Chance the Gardener” (which is what he said), is interpreted to be “Chauncey Gardiner.” During dinner at the Rands’ home, Chance describes attorneys coming to his former house and shutting it down. Judging by his appearance and overall demeanor, Ben Rand automatically assumes that Chauncey is an upper class, well-to-do, highly educated business man. Although Chance is really describing being kicked out of the home where he tended to the garden, Ben Rand perceives it as attorneys shutting down Chance’s business because of financial problems; he even assumes it must have been caused by “kid lawyers from the SEC,” obviously attributing it to have occurred at a higher, more sophisticated level than a tax/IRS problem, as most persons would likely have assumed. Sympathizing with him, Ben Rand takes Chance under his wing. Chauncey’s personal style and seemingly conservative and insightful ways embody many qualities that Ben admires. His simplistic, serious-sounding utterances, which mostly concern the garden, are interpreted as allegorical statements of deep wisdom and knowledge regarding business matters and the current state of the economy in America. Read more