His film is a portrait, not only of Chance’s comical and ironic journey to the White House but also the institutions that quickly put their faith in someone who tells them what they want to hear. But rather than another story about rebels against the system, Being There finds Ashby exposing the stupidity and soullessness of American politics, television, religion, and racial hierarchies. Likewise, Jane Fonda sees the human toll of Vietnam in Coming Home, epitomized by Jon Voight’s disabled Vet and Bruce Dern’s ideologically crushed soldier. The sailors in The Last Detail raise all sorts of hell, representing the lost innocence and hopelessness felt by many during Vietnam, while questioning the institutions that perpetuate it. Bud Court’s alienated teen in Harold and Maude acts out against his wealthy mother by staging fake suicides with grisly detail. Most of Ashby’s films center on disenchanted characters who rebel against systems of authority. And so, Chance finds himself in the position of a trusted political advisor and public figure, and before long, he becomes the next in line for the presidency. He’s instantly trusted by men of power, including Jack Warden’s President of the United States, who takes Chance’s inane observations, which are nothing more than gardening tips and lines repeated from television programs, as insightful wisdom about grand economic and geopolitical concepts. Rand’s wife Eve (Shirley MacLaine) misidentifies “Chance the gardener” as “Chauncey Gardiner,” a cipher who becomes everything to everyone he meets. Because he’s well-dressed in the deceased “old man’s” finely tailored hand-me-down clothes, Chance is mistaken for a well-to-do businessman. and, soon enough, finds himself struck by a limousine that belongs to one of the richest, most powerful men in the world, Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas). After the death of his wealthy benefactor, known only as the “old man,” with whom he has lived his entire life in isolation, Chance is forced onto the streets of Washington D.C. Television has been Chance’s only exposure to the outside world beyond the walled garden where he has spent his entire life. Chance is a blank-minded, emotionally muted gardener. But Ashby, ever the anti-authoritarian, had one more blow to strike against the systems of American politics, organized religion, and media culture.īeing There is the story of Chance, played by Peter Sellers in arguably his finest and most complex performance. Worse, the rebels of the 1960s and the New Hollywood had sold out. However, television had become so inescapable in the American home that life seemed almost impossible without its constant buzz. The most prominent symbols of the establishment were fading away: Richard Nixon had left the White House, the Vietnam War had ended, and several small victories had been won for racial equality and women’s rights. Being There arrived at the end of the decade, after the rebelliousness and radical behavior of 1960s counterculture had subsided into the drugs and self-indulgence of the so-called “Me” generation of the 1970s. His films such as Harold and Maude (1971), The Last Detail (1973), Shampoo (1975), and Coming Home (1978) made Americans rethink their attitudes toward politics, the Vietnam War, sexuality, and each other. Over the next several years, Ashby made seven other classics of American counterculture cinema. The novel by Polish-born author Jerzy Kosinski had been published in 1970, the same year that Ashby made his directorial debut with The Landlord. Among the sharpest of all satires, Being There, released in 1979, would be the last great film made by director Hal Ashby, who had the most extraordinary track record of any filmmaker of the 1970s.
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