this is one of many movies that, as a self-professed film snob, it is pretty much unforgivable that i have never seen it…
peter sellers was absolutely amazing – he played the role perfectly every moment, too much would have made us feel he was something less than a person, too little and he would have come across as just disinterested… i poked around a bit at the various things that have been said over the last thirty years about his performance and it has been well-covered, so, i’ll skip right to the stuff i can’t forgive…
but, before i go on, let me say that i am keeping this film and will surely view it again – but pretty much only for his performance…
my objections are simple to state – i just didn’t believe it… i didn’t buy it that these people didn’t catch on… is there a reason that the director wanted me to catch on to? maybe, but, if so, it is buried deeper than i was able to look…
this movie kept calling to mind some cartoon i saw many many years ago… somehow, a dog ends up like president of a company or something… i have scoured the net, trying to find info on this cartoon, hoping to embed/link it here, but i just remember too little… anyway, he is in some kind of power – we are talking probably nearly 20 years ago i saw it, but it was something like he was in the right place at the right time, maybe accidentally got human clothes on him, but one way or another, they made him president, all his growls and barks and grunts somehow twisted by them into what they thought they heard or wanted to hear or whatever… i remember two details clearly – the first is that they ask his name and he growls something that sounds like “rawelf gawagrrr” and they ‘repeat’ back Ralph Gallagher… and the last is when something happens that everyone suddenly figures out his true nature and someone shouting “HE’S A DOG!”… the whole incident is carried along by this device of them misunderstanding what to us are clearly dog noises as mumbled speech and we are laughing at them for not noticing the obvious fact that he is a dog…
well, in this movie we have the choked “Chance, the gardener” becoming “Chauncey Gardiner” and did the doctor figure it out at the end? seems so… but, there certainly was the attempts at being a whistleblower – not quite a “HE’S A GARDENER!”, but, i just couldn’t get the similarities off my mind… and i saw a cast of fools all focused on a very endearing character who who would have been much better off in a better written movie…
so, i’m sort of saying that it just kept coming across the same way… like it was intending to be only a comedy… which is a shame, because the first half hour or so, i was totally hooked in… i guess it was when he tried to change the channel on the would-be muggers that i started being concerned…
which, by the way, i have been thinking… so, he watched tv for all those years but didn’t learn how to use a phone? or that you can’t change the channel on real life?
ok, so, maybe that means, in his deficiency, he saw it for years but never internalized it… like it was a meaningless blur… he detailed to the two in the beginning his room and bathroom – down to the details of his tub, his toilet, his sink, and showed them his garden and perhaps that was all that was really real to him? the rest was something unreal and so he had no point of reference even with all that input? ok, sure, i could see that… of course, he had tears in his eyes in one of the last scenes… and i’m not going to be too quick to jump to any “well, see, he is now becoming aware of the world” because if he had that ability, one would think he would have clicked into something many years earlier, even if it was only a response to something on tv…
hmm…
i just don’t know…
then, of course, the very last thing that happened and i don’t even have much in the way of theories yet… i’d like to read around what others have said over the years…
but, since i had a hard time recognizing a pattern pointing to any kind of other meaning, i fear it meant nothing coherent at all…
i can’t help but think about the meaning of it all, but, i’m not certain that the director deserves for me to think about it… there was so much in there that just seemed to be no deeper than some comic effect… like the bedroom scene – you know, he “likes to watch”… i can’t come up with any reason why that was important – i think it was just meant to be funny… and i kept feeling that way about many other scenes… trying to find some reason to look for meaning and just not finding one…
i will go so far as to say that i think if peter sellers had not played this role, this would be a completely forgettable movie… i know that’s the case for me anyway…
say whatever about who or what he was, why he was or why he was the way he was, what it all means, or whatever, i don’t see that it will change my mind that WHAT HAPPENED just is not believable and i find it very hard to be moved by something i cannot believe…
ok, i am not gonna go back and edit this at all or even re-read it… i keep telling myself that i should force out a couple paragraphs every time i watch a movie and i have to start somewhere and if i go back and read it, i will change things and then decide it was a bad idea to even post – best to wait for a movie i can write something meaningful about or i will add three more paragraphs that are equally disjointed and that will only make it worse, so, i’m just gonna hit that publish button…
(i’m much fonder of this post…)
oh, i have had this “see also” thing going for years when i watch a movie, so….
see also: Meet Joe Black