Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
and changes do, though, make a real impact once one has settled into the bath of sound. Childs's choreography, divided into five equal parts of twenty minutes duration each, was devised as...
...It is worth noting that the word House, $10, 203 pp...
...Figures huddled beneath capes from under which shone glimmers of light...
...be the only talent possessed by an idiot savant, a single way he He walks on the water to get to it...
...yet we can also accept that the other charac- We're a little startled ourselves...
...It takes an action and reduces it to a state of being...
...Sellers so underacts this has discovered that he can get approval from the world...
...and changes do, though, make a real impact once one has settled into the bath of sound...
...by JACOB HABERMAN its great strengths...
...the ausonal and so right as to be a wonder...
...It was like opening a family photo album for a casual scan of the fading snapshots and being led into speculation on the genetic code or the double helix...
...There is a grandeur and MAIMONIDES biographical elements but its stature as a yet directness of tone here appropriate to AND AQUINAS record of religious faith surely is one of the subject...
...All of these elements were linked by references to archeological exploration and discovery...
...Finally the entire space was darkened, only to be illuminated by photographer's flash guns...
...He ought to be, since it's better than his novel...
...I hear that Kosinski is very pleased with the rubbers...
...The couple on the stage danced slowly at another point to a nostalgic waltz, then films were shown of men and women being classified after examination...
...At times stop-action sequences broke down the movement into its component parts...
...So Ashby was able to perform a real service...
...His feelings are so mild, they're almost non-existent...
...Not only did the doctors peer at them but they were measured for length by the zebralike marking sticks of the professional archeologist...
...In the book, there is an irony in the fact that the acceptance of Chance discrepancy between him and Ashby, there has been room for among all his fabulous new friends results from their having Chance to grow, and for Sellers to cultivate him...
...A prot~g~ of Norman Jewison, under whom he was assistant director on such films as Heat of the Night, Ashby picked up Jewison's weakness for stories with too much potential message...
...Sections two and four had stark white lighting and were solos for the choreographer...
...M EREDITH MONK'S concerns are less with the feelings of dance itself, though these play an important part in her work, but more with the examination of myth...
...Coming Home was directed by him way back in 1978...
...Chauncey Gardiner," she repeates thoughtfully,"You crypt in which the industrialist is being buried, for instance, is must be related to the Gardiners we know...
...At the death of the Old Man whose garden he has tended all his life, Chance shows no grief...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...stomach it emotionally," but Flannery Press, $3.95,204 pp...
...A perfect stand-off...
...He has about him that same inane sweetness that Mr...
...have the feeling that Father Brown is Author of Zen Catholicism and seven Another work where the tone is fight is going to footnote the reader to death...
...The need for details was so great, in fact, that helping to supply them may have worn Ashby out...
...The individual projections used a quarter, half, or all of the space to intersperse low, medium, or close-up views of the dancers...
...Below them and at the far end of the hall a couple in hiking clothes proceeded down opposite sides of the space chalking lines and descriptive symbols on the floor...
...gotten his name wrong...
...The whole island...
...Through his association with this powerful man, he gets on television himself, a celebrity whose literal statements about gardens are taken for a kind of figurative wisdom...
...He didn't have the energy left to make them significant details...
...Like all Kosinski's characters, Mr...
...A step followed by a short hop gradually developed into almost balletic sequences of hnked small turns and~ leaps--yet they all progressed out of the skip...
...We can tell just from the title that the movie must deal with some divorced schlemiel in suburban Connecticut or a kid from an Indiana college town who has delusions of grandeur--with old codgers trying to get by on Social Security, or a halfwit whose world is circumscribed by his TV and his garden...
...The story is rife with opportunities for black comedy, social satire, etc...
...Mcfeelies" are what Chance has instead of feelings...
...Likewise, all of Sellers's Commonweal...
...No matter how strange Kosinski's fiction gets, his life always strikes us as stranger...
...The only one that lives up to its title isBeing There, Hal Ashby's new film based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski...
...A gerund phrase isn't a complete thought, of course, and it suggests a movie that isn't either...
...Quite naturally, talking about, as always, is "the God of most of the attention paid to this marvel the Gospel" and how He approaches of a book has stressed its literary and man and woman...
...It seems almost a swindle that experience as rare and wild as Kosinski's should produce a novel so slight, so easily enjoyed...
...We are aware that this is only a little ventilation from the volcano, a thin, popularized whiff of what this man has really been through...
...The ,'dork is a notable achievement...
...The suits are beautifully tailored, but neither their fit nor their style is quite right because they were originally made for the Old Man...
...The amazing thing about the movie is that it avoids almost all these temptations...
...Rogers has...
...Childs's solos were lean and precise and slightly overlong, since they were devoid of the interest generated by the changing combinations of dancers in the group portions...
...A woman, of earth mother proportions, stalked through the space like a prehistoric huntress tossing and breaking objects, which presumably would be examined by later generations for their significance...
...Nowadays, the emphasis his case wwth great acumen and SUl>discussing these matters is both so per- is on Biblical study and the early Christ- ports it from recognized authorities...
...What Barth is being entirely too popular and insuffiGiroux, $15,617 pp...
...in 1962 and later ex- writings and communities--in this case, I I panded, this is a short compendium of not nearly so well known, is The Gnostic T WOULD BE difficult to compile al- Barthian themes and emphases in theol- Gospels, by Elaine Pagels (Random most any kind of list of favorite ogy...
...One of the best of these thor has made a valuable contdbution her own phrase, "the truth does not studies is The Community of the Beloved which should arrest the attention of change according to our ability to Disciple, by Raymond E. Brown (Paulist Jewish and Christian scholars alike...
...The way the book reads, he has not only given away parts of his life to Chance, but turned over his typewriter as well...
...Yet maybe this reticence in Kosinski was just the thing needed to offset the self-inflation in Ashby...
...Ashby has been something of a pioneer in the development of the verbal-fragment-title concept...
...Kosinski's novel is too spare...
...At most they're a wistful mirror of Chance's own personality, as when he flicks the dial one morning and comes up with Mr...
...loves his subject...
...What does a verbal like this do, anyway...
...I I Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES II II I I I I Based on a series of lectures that Barth Another book which explores early Arthur J. Moore gave in the U.S...
...Like Chance's suits, Peter Sellers's performance as Chance is impeccable...
...As always with these Still, what counts these days is no "1 am most favorably imletters, it is a temptation to quote (but longer these confident affirmations of pressed both with the author's learning and the book's general tone...
...Childs's choreography, divided into five equal parts of twenty minutes duration each, was devised as a series of variations upon the rudimentary skipping step of childhood...
...The result was details which are just fight, not too pregnant, but not merely decorative either...
...Only the heroic component is played down...
...nize him as such...
...Her work "RecentRuins" was an imaginative examination of recently lost societies of Eastern Europe whose present-day descendants painfully feel the loss of their immediate past...
...After spending his life watching television and tending the garden of a house he never leaves, the movie's feeble-minded hero is suddenly adopted by a wealthy industrialist...
...Oh," Mr...
...Chance the gardener," he mumbles In the closing scene of Being There, we can see Hal Ashby's when the industrialist's wife (Shirley MacLaine) first asks who worst instincts finally beginning to get the better of him...
...A glum man next to me who had not laughed at the movie once so far perked up at this...
...At another point in this collage, the preseniation juxtaposed images from the clearly remote past...
...It has an appealing modesty about it...
...Where Ashby gives us the impression that he lacks in himself the substance he wants his satires to have, Kosinski always seems to exceed as a person aiaything he writes...
...It's advertising, not information...
...Sellers saves the day...
...With details as arch and meaningful as that, we hardly need to watch the rest of the movie (as a matter of fact, why did we...
...These were like "paintings" compared to her "drawings" and the idea of making them both the same length was a slight miscalculation in terms of audience attention...
...A small book on The Thomist reasoning about Trans...
...Until now, however, Ashby's films have been weighed down by their social gravity...
...but the tone in personal belief...
...Have you noticed the vogue for gerund phrases used as movie titles...
...He offers to the world the sort of instant-on affection that Mr...
...29 February 1980:119...
...We know we're definitely not going to be seeingStar Wars...
...It dealt with an enclosed world of highly disciplined movement and presented varying aspects of intentness, fun, formal relationships, and ecstatic abandon that are the experience of dancing...
...A man and a woman labored at a table at one end of the long room in which the work was presented, examining and assembling shards of pottery...
...In the novel Kosinski never bothers to tell us what program Chance is watching on television, but in the film when Chance switches on a set, something has to appear on the screen...
...Where Chance is a simpleton thought brilliant, Kosinski was as a boy a genius thought simple...
...On his own trying to elude capture by the Nazis at age nine, Kosinski lost his powers of speech, and after the war was put in a school for mental defectives...
...Rogers' Neighborhood...
...Fortunately, time and remembers it from then on...
...But other books a reprint of Karl Barth's Evangelical the writing is clear, the content is fas- Ktav Publishing House, Inc...
...He argues where would you stop...
...We often visit their a pyramid with a human eye gazing from its peak...
...Whenever anything disagreeable happens, he reachs for the only other button he has, instant-off..Menaced on the street by some black teenagers, Chance pulls his remote-control tuner from his pocket and clicks it at them...
...We can tell that Ashby Sellers 6ndows Chance with the social grace of never making a has become impatient with merely being there...
...DON McDONAGH Screen / I GOING NOWHERE THE SOFTWARE OF EMOTIONAL LIFE S TARTING OVER, Breaking Away, Going in Style, Being There...
...McFeely," he said to his wife...
...In ian communities...
...Monk's imagination is as fertile as ever and her collection of moving images powerfully provocative...
...There is an uncertainty to a gerund phrase, a kind of tentativeness...
...Because Kosinski is reluctant to expatiate or supply detail, that Ashby is usually eager to do so didn't hurt for once...
...Sellers wanders off from the funeral by The way Sellers emphasizes this knack Chance has, it might himself and comes to a pond in which he notices a fallen tree...
...but once he's Sellers's adroitness with these traits he invents for Chance is ascertained that he really is standing on top of several feet of that we, who know Chance to be a corhplete imbecile, recog- water, he loses interest and goes back to examining the tree...
...It won't be terribly moving--just touching...
...I wonder why that is...
...I love Mr...
...Only the "chance" relationship, the brief acquaintance such as one might have with a character on a soap opera, can move him...
...Actually, the titles make these movies sound more interesting than most of them are...
...17.50 --Dora Aelred Graham, O.S.B., fully...
...We can be sure that a film with a gerund phrase for a title won't try to overpower us...
...In the film, though not in the film...
...miracle that the annoying allusion to Christ scarcely occurs to Chance repeats everybody's name a bit too insistently, just as us...
...For her, myth as a category of narrative did not stop in prehistory but exists in the here and now, iml~licit in the lives of ordinary men and women, a thread linking present lives with those of past generations...
...We cannot help our misgivings that in reading mere novels, we never really get the full story...
...But when the industrialist (Melvyn Douglas) who has taken him in for a few days dies, Chance's eyes are moist...
...These bursts revealed large, white tortoises crawling painfully along after an intermittent light while a line of large insects whited animatedly on the ends of sticks...
...McFeely...
...The software of the emotional life is all that's available to him...
...118 mannerisms are just slightly off...
...Coming Home has a moment when Jane Fonda turns on a set late on the night that her husband has shipped out for Vietnam...
...McFeely" sounds like a cutesy way to say feeling, as if emotions were, like excrement, something you'have tomake up euphemisms for...
...10013 lishing Company, $5.95, 206 pp...
...Chance is a hard role to play because even when he is "being there," fight there where the action is among the rich and famous, he's still not there in a sense--"not all there," as people say...
...It's as if he would compensate for the baroque quality of his experiences by making his narrative excessively streamlined...
...Nonetheless, the comments that the television insertions make on the movie are more oblique and imaginative...
...The form of the presentation combined song, wordless vocalization, dramatic vignettes, group passages of operatic-like movement and chanting, film sequences, and slide visuals...
...Rogers says on hearing a knock at his door, "That's Mr...
...A movie, just by its nature as a movie, has to have more detail than Kosinski's novel provides...
...The quest for simple information about immediate forebears has been enlarged into a delving inquiry into the nature of life and man's origins that proceeded quite logically from the more easily recoverable information...
...Later these were examined by two women dressed as Victorian" antiquarians" as the profession was then known...
...How would it have sounded if Star Wars had been called Launching Out...
...ubstantiation is well understood and the O'Connor's letters show how she Johannine ecclesiology may sound for- author's tone is attractively modest and stomached it emotionally and beauti- bidding and, at the beginning, one does moderate...
...Chance in Being There draws on Kosinski's own life...
...These passages had a draftsmanly spareness compared to the richer orchestrations that characterized the ensemble sections...
...a keening wail emerged...
...But we decide that it's all ters in the story, who don't know the truth, would utterly right, his being there, because we've noticed that he has on his misconstrue him...
...The film explores an irony missed by the book when mood is getting ominously allegorical...
...He sounds the pond with his umbrella...
...On comes a picture of the American flag and the sound of the Star-Spangled Banner, then the screen goes blank because it's sign-off time...
...That's what a title is supposed to do...
...I suspect that what restrained Ashby this time was Kosinski, who not only wrote the novel but collaborated on the screenplay...
...The two men are a happy combination, like Jack Sprat and his wife...
...On the one h~nd it's a verb, but on the other 29 February 1980:117 hand, a noun...
...The book talks about Chance the way Chance himself talks about his garden--as if speaking a parable that has no exegesis...
...The work had a disarming simplicity to it so that the viewer was carded along by the seamless flow of the dance steps, the aural environment, and the filmed interludes...
...At a skimpy 118 pages, Being There would barely have made a feature movie if it had been filmed word by word...
...The film sequences were fastidiously synchronized with the movements of the dancers and were shown on' a transparent scrim covering the entire front of the stage...
...He wants his mistake like this...
...We can't tell whether it's supposed to be a subject or an object or what...
...The company of four couples danced sections one, three, and five, which were lit with one of the three primary colors, blue, yellow, and finally red...
...Chance is a bit startled by what he has done, though only a he thanks people for small amenities a bit too effusively...
...The he is...
...The search for evolutionary forms has been joined to the previous search through recent ruins...
...Kosinski's marriage to the young widow of an American tycoon also parallels a romance in the novel between Chance and the wife of the dying industrialist...
...It just dangles...
...It seems to admit right up front that the movie it names gives us c~nly a partial and incomplete view of life, a fragment...
...The movie is going to be about what goes on in just one small corner of the world among people who know they aren't all there is to life...
...In Being There the opportunities are greater to use television sets as if they were telegraph keys, as a way to flash urgent signals to the audience...
...Scholars, among books for the last year that idid not -evangelical here is not used in any "con- them Father Brown, have tended to look begin with The Habit of Being, Letters of fessional, that is, in a denominational down their noses at Pagels's book as Flannery O'Connor (Farrar, Straus and and exclusive, sense...
...Theology (William B. Eerdmans Pub- cinating, and the author both knows and 75 Varick Street, New York, N.Y...
...Ashby's The Landlord, The Last Detail, Coming Home and Shampoo all suffered from this...
...Rogers offers to children...
...Chance gets everyone's name right the first movie to go somewhere before it's too late...
...Being There could have as well...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 4
