****NOTE THE READER(S) OF THIS BLOG: Hi mom. I have revised the way in which I rate the movies. You will see the result below.****

Directed by Hal Ashby

Starring Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack “Big Ben Healy” Warden

IMDB Synopsis: “A simple-minded gardener named Chance (Sellers) has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. His simple TV-informed utterances are mistaken for profundity.”

I don’t know how to describe this film, except that it is just really good. When I first heard the plot synopsis I was kind of worried. For me, comedies that are overly reliant on coincidence and misuderstandings, which inevitably lead to the main character’s stupidity being mistaken for genius often becomes tiresome and obnoxious. Not here, however.

This movie definitely doesn’t have the high energy slap-stick of Seller’s Pink Panther films. It’s slowly paced with an incredibly dry humor, and the film doesn’t have many “punchline” moments where the audience is basically directed when to laugh. Instead, the film is “deeply” funny. What I mean by this is that the movie doesn’t rely on over-the-top gags to hide that nothing is actually happening. A lot of comedies employ in-your-face, “surface” jokes that never really tap into anything substantial. Instead Being There takes its time and . The way that the film handles this also leads me to say that its an incredibly smart film as well.

Peter Sellers is really incredible here. And the rest of the cast does well too.

Rent It - eventually