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Rating: "It's like watching television. Only you can see much further"
In 1979, Hal Ashby produced his final cinematic gem. He returns to telling a modern fairy tale as he did with "Harold and Maude" and brings to the cinema an incredible, polite character, yet also fundamentally stupid and totally out of touch with the world.
Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers) is a man without a history, he doesn't even have his own identity or a real name; raised isolated in a Chicago house, he doesn't know how to read or write. Everything he knows he learned from television in a very diluted and simplified form. The lack of form, being essentially a kind of naive tabula rasa, leads him to have his own naturalistic philosophy that astonishes and fascinates the world beyond his garden. Ashby brings to the big screen a novel by Jerzy Kosinski and maintains with this surreal and poetic story his vision of the world, the one in which in a land inhabited by ordinary and easily classifiable people, there is always someone who escapes every rule, and with his unclassifiable way of being is ready to change the lives of others. First Maude and now Chance are figures at the fringes of society, mysterious and fascinating. But the gardener of "Being There" escapes any attempt to give him a human dimension, he is almost a sort of prophet of a philosophy of life devoted to simplicity; however, he is a figure raised thanks to television and lacks a critical mindset, the US economic world sees something in him that he is not, a great economist with innovative ideas "In a garden there is a season for growth. First come spring and summer, and then we have autumn and winter. But then spring and summer return." Ultimately, in him, there is only a candid ignorance and a childlike way of being, a purity that "contaminates" the world that welcomes him as a revolutionary and is not able to simply accept him as a simpleton, "And may I be damned if he ever learned to read or write. No sir! He was half-witted. Instead of a brain, he had a handful of dried figs. A mistake of the Almighty. He was as stupid as a duck."
Ashby signs a film that can be read on many levels, there is a critique of modern society that loses all contact with its simplest nature. The character of Chance can be seen as an attempt to bring simplicity back into a world contaminated by centuries of history, but the mysterious and dreamlike ending has the power to unsettle the viewer.
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