Word: kosinski
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years ago, Jerzy Kosinski wrote a short novel about an idiot gardener who does nothing but watch TV, tend to his plants, eat and sleep. His screenplay for Being There could hardly be more faithful to the novel. According to Kosinski's metaphorical fable, the TV-idiot, Chauncey Gardiner (Sellers), bumps his way to the mansion of influential, dying financier, Melvyn Douglas and his younger, sex-starved wife Shirley MacLaine. So limited is Gardiner's intelligence that his communication consists only of child-like imitations of people he has seen on TV or references to his beloved garden. The hilarity...
...ABSURD, fairy-tale premise of the story works in Kosinski's novel because the author, like the Grimms, writes caressing, witty words while he brazenly plunders his frail theme. Ashby's direction of Kosinski's script slips at times from wit to slapstick but generally maintains a simple, even tone reflective of his hero, the boob-tube boob...
...Where Kosinski had to describe in print the TV show that Gardiner watches constantly (in his garden, at meals, in bed, at parties) Ashby orchestrates his film with TV snippets: cartoons, concerts, exercise classes, the news, sit-coms and of course, commercials. The inspired collection of TV clips climaxes when MacLaine tries to seduce Gardiner while he eats breakfast in bed, all of his attention focused on his TV and the irrepressible Mr. Rogers ("won't you be mine?"). Ashby had to tell a story about a man who, like his TV, captures attention wherever he goes...
...story goes that Sellers read Kosinski's novel and decided the Gardiner had been created for him. In any case, he portrays perfectly the simple voice and simple gestures of this simple man whose world of TV and roses expands around him to include politics and sex without expanding him. He is miraculously changed from the comic inanity of the Pink Panther tales or even his tense how-deep-is-your glove performance in Dr. Strangelove. While Being There demands a Brooklyn-Bridge-sized suspension of disbelief, Sellers never loses Gardiner's innocent, vulnerable essence...