I finally got around to seeing Being There last night, and I quite enjoyed it. I dug around on the Dope and found this old thread from 2002, but decided to start a new thread rather than ressurect that old one.
I thought Peter Sellers was amazing in the role of Chance. He played it with such subtlety and charm and earnestness. Of course, the ending was a bit of a mind-bender for me… (Is the movie old enough to talk about this without spoiler boxes?)… to be safe, I’ll throw a box here anyway:
[spoiler] So did he walk on water or not? I like the thought that since the entire movie is Chance having other people’s perceptions forced upon him, the final scene is the director asking the audience to force their perceptions on Chance. If you believe he walked on water… then perhaps he did."
Also… the scene when Rand dies, and the Chance puts his hand on Rand’s chest… The way the camera cuts away and you hear a voice say “I understand.” and then the doctor turns to Rand’s body and asks, “I understand?”… What do you make of that? Who do you believe said “I understand?” [/spoiler]
Anyway, I thought this movie was really well directed, well written, and terrifically acted. What says you?
Since it’s impossible to discuss the OP’s question without discussing the contents of the spoilerbox, I won’t use one. If anyone objects, please ask a moderator to box the rest of this post.
I always allowed the names of the film and it’s main character to guide my interpretation of that last shot. Chance realizes he’s out in the middle of the water, and is obviously perplexed. He takes his umbrella, and pokes it deep into the water, first on one side, then on the other.
One could interpret this to mean that the water is deep, and Chance is literally walking on water. This would make him more than an ordinary man, as most of the people he encounters in the film have assumed.
However, another interpretation is that Chance is the simple gardner he has been shown to be, who has through extraordinary chance managed to consistently end up in the right place at the right time. Chance has placed our gardener on a very unusual path. The smallest deviation from that path would have placed him in a very different place. The name of the film is, after all, “Being There.” Like the old saying that 95% of life is being there. Not to the left, where the water is deep, or to the right, where the water is deeper, but right there.
Many people disagree with this, including Roger Ebert. Their objections generally are based upon the suggestion that it is extremely unlikely that Chance would just happen to end up on the only path across the water. But it seems to me that this is almost mundane compared to the long chain of increasingly unlikely events which have brought him to the water in the first place.
Chance walking on water just takes the premise of the film to its logical conclusion. Although Sellers and Douglas play their parts with disarming sweetness, thereby keeping the viewer off balance, the fact is that this movie (and the book) are a sardonic look at power.
Chance is a mentally retarded man. Completely by accident, he becomes the confident of a powerful man and a sexual object for his daughter. He never really says or does anything, but people interpret his banal remarks as reinforcing what they want to hear. The president thinks he’s offering wise council in the form of a metaphor, when all he’s really doing is making a random remark about a garden. He gets on TV, and the only person who really knows what’s going on can only express her disbelief and contempt. Near the end, he’s considered a potential candidate for the presidency.
The logical conclusion is to project him into the role of messiah. That’s all the walking on water scene is about.
I’d mention in passing that I believe there’s more than a bit of self reflection concerning Kosinski the con man in this book/movie.
Here’s my off the wall take. Chance is a religious figure. His name is Gardner, as in Garden of Eden, as in God planting the world. The last scene drives it home. I think him walking on the only path across the water would be a tremendous cheat, something the movie didn’t do. (I haven’t read the book.) But while Chance is God, Chance is powerless, so everyone reads what they want into him, just as people ascribe their successes and failures to a god who isn’t there. God, why did you let that earthquake happen? “I like to watch.”
The only time Chance tries to control the world is when he tries to stop the attack with his remote. After that he is passive. So, God is chance.
I guess I just put entirely too much weight behind the last line of the film: “Life is a state of mind.” Chance walks on water for the simple reason that he doesn’t know any better.
I think it’s interesting that Ashby’s film uses a jazzy version of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra as the background music for Chance’s embarking on his grand adventure – especially since Stanley Kubrick made so prominent use of a standard classical recording of the same theme in his **2001: A Space Odyssey ** about a decade earlier.
IIRC, in both films the music underscores a scene of rapid progression or progress (from ignorance to learning, as it were), involving some element of violent conflict, which the narrative quickly dispenses with to resume the story on an elevated, rarified plane. In 2001, it was the early hominids encountering the monolith, their violent agitation (but were they already fighting amongst themselves prior to the 'lith’s arrival?), culminating in one’s hurling a bone weapon into the air, which – one famous graphic match cut later – becomes a spacecraft. In Being There, it’s Chance leaving his garden, exploring the streets, being hassled by some street toughs and hearing some crude language the likes of which he’d never heard on TV, his being mystified by the CC television display (like a baby or an animal, Chance doesn’t quite know what to make of this two-dimensional reflection of himself), and finally his bumping into the Rands, who quickly cocoon him in the luxurious comfort and security he enjoys for the duration of his adventure, much as Kubrick’s film, and the astronauts it focuses on, left behind the vast violent eons of human history in their spacecraft.
I have no idea if Ashby was emulating Kubrick consciously or unconsciously, if he intended a tribute or perhaps an ironic dig at his film. But it’s an interesting parallel.
When he first leaves his garden, IIRC Chance walks down the middle of a busy road, danger on either side of him. At the end of the movie, he walks across a lake, deep water on either side of him.
The poster of the movie (Wiki) shows him walking above the only path through deep snow on either side of him.
So there’s an argument for the metaphor of the safe path through danger mentioned earlier.
But my opinion is that he walked on water because he didn’t know he should sink - which is also bourne out by his continual rise through society, because he doesn’t understand the rules.