BEING THERE (1979)
Being There is a classy film top-notch playwright Jerzy Kosinski, expertly directly by Hal Ashby, and starring winners like Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas. It's a satire, or fantasy, or "magical realism" since much of the film is played seriously yet it is constantly interlaced with events that are not actually believable.
The movie deliberately unfolds very slowly. Sellers pays a severely mentally challenged 50-year-old-man, functioning at about the level of a four-year-old, who is a political expert on TV and potentially on his way to the White House by the end of the film. People constantly miscommunicate with each other and nearly everything Sellers says is misunderstood by at least one other character. Throughout the film, TV's are playing in the background with content irrelevant to the action, yet intruding on it. The content streams non-stop and one-way into the environment of the characters. Familiar character actor Richard Dysart plays a physician who's involved in the story and is an audience surrogate, as he spends most of this time and viewpoint watching the other characters and trying to figure out what is going on. Shirley Maclaine's character is beautifully acted, via subtle sexual tension building with Sellers' character in their every scene throughout the film.
CASINO JACK (2010)
For me, one of Kevin Spacey's most enjoyable roles, in a high key comedy-satire based on real events surrounding Jack Abramoff, a big-spending, uninhibited lobbyst circa 1990. Abramoff is on his way to a six-year prison sentence by the end of the movie, most of which is played for comedy. It's meant to be a behind-the-scenes view of big-money lobbying and Washington back hallways and tactics.
It was a low-impact movie theatrically ($12M budget, $1M box office) but I've seen it several times and enjoyed it just as much on reviewing. In short, I'm not in tune with the 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; for the right viewer, it's a damn fun movie.
MISS SLOANE (2016)
I've also seen this movie three or four times and enjoyed it on every re-viewing. Jessica Chastain plays a driven, ruthless Washington lobbyist. She must have a complicated back story, given what we see of both her tortured personal and professional life, but the movie leaves the back story entirely to our imaginations. Like Casino Jack, it was low impact in the public eye ($13M budget, $9M box office). I find it entertaning both for characters and plot, and it has one of the best switcheroo O.-Henry endings of any movie. John Lithgow is a delight playing the bad guy.
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Personal Notes
When Being There came out at Christmas 1979, I was a junior pre-med at Stanford, The next summer, in July 1980, Sellers died at 53 of a heart attack. That month, through the pre-med association, I had dinner with a San Francisco psychiatrist who was training as a Jungian analyst and I remember that Seller's death that week was a topic we mentioned.
In Being There, the plot is unfurled very slowly. For most of the first several scenes, there is minimal dialog: we just watch Peter Seller's character.
Late in the movie, the cutting becomes much more lively, cutting back and forth between four or five different story lines in scenes only a few lines long.
A favorite moment: Melvyn Howard, an 80 year old billionaire, is visited by the President (Jack Warden) at an enormous country estate. Howard has the President sent to the grand library room, and Howard tips off Sellers this is a trick to "keep him waiting." Entering the library, Sellers and Howard at first don't see the President, who must have used the enforced delay to quickly climb to the second floor, looking steeply down at them when then enter, and thus seizing priority.
I see Being There as a form of fantasy-realism or magical-realism, since much of the setting is very realistic, yet Sellers' character is like a Martian moving about the other characters and speaking at the level of a four year old. Everyone responds differently to him, conveying the idea that 90% of our responses to others are in our own heads.
For a nice 12-minute review and clips from Being There, at YouTube, Essential Films, here.
14-year-old Illeana Douglas visited the set to see her grandfather and her favorite actor, Peter Sellers. She later said this contributed to her career choice to be an actress.
Several of the artists didn't live long after the film. Sellers died in July 1980 (53). Melvyn Douglas died in August 1981 (80). The great writer Kosinski, born 1933 in Poland, lived to 1991 but died at age 57 as a suicide. I tend to think of Kosinski and Being There as being of a piece with Paddy Chayefsky's Network (1976). Chayefsky died age 58 in 1981.
