Today TCM airs Being There, the 1979 movie starring Peter Sellers, Melvin Douglas, and Shirley MacLaine that satirizes the culture of political celebrity in America. In it, Sellers plays Chance, the gardener, who is put out of work, and home, when the wealthy owner of the Washington, DC townhouse where he resides dies. He had lived in the house his whole life and when he is suddenly thrust into the world, he simply doesn’t know how to react because he doesn’t actually possess any life skills that would make the outside world workable for him. He’s a simpleton, a man born and raised with no knowledge of how the world works, or that it even exists, and seeing everything through the prism of gardening. It’s a one-note performance all the way as Peter Sellers retains, essentially, one tone, one level of volume, one attitude, for the whole thing. And it works. But is it good?
It’s a funny thing, really. As an actor, I knew, as all actors do, that the hardest thing to do is connect. Look the other actor in the eye and make it feel, to both you the actor and the audience, that it’s real. Great performances often come from great connections. They say good actors makes other around good and bad bring the whole lot down. It’s true. I once did a play with an actor that no one particularly liked but the director felt had the right look for the part. He was static and droning onstage, quoting the script lines in monotone and making it hard as hell for anyone to realistically play off of him, making the whole enterprise feel like one big fraud. We made it through but none of us felt like we gave our best work because his part was pretty damned important and brought the rest of us down. Another time, I was in a play where the lead actress got sacked with only about ten days to go to performance (this was back in the nineties, during some brief flirtations I had with the legitimate theater before abandoning it for sanity sake, as well as dropping out of AFTRA and SAG because the voice-over work had too much competition). It was a decision that shocked all of us in the cast but the director felt like he’d made a mistake and he had ten days to correct it. She wasn’t playing well off of me at all and I was the lead so it was kind of important that we work well together (she played to herself like she was in constant monologue and that didn’t fly well with the cast, or the director, obviously) and the director wanted someone stronger before the play went up. Well, he brought in a classically trained British actress who hadn’t even auditioned and, holy mackerel, she learned that script in about four days and brought my performance up three or four notches. She connected to me immediately. It takes talent to do what she did and she had it, in spades.
So why do I bring this all up? Because not connecting is the easiest thing in the world for an actor, as long as you’re not concerned with how it affects everyone else. If someone told me I could deliver all my lines while staring at the ground and never have to consider what the other actors were doing for my reactions, because I could read my lines the same way no matter what, and on top of that assure me that when all was said and done people would praise my performance as great and maybe even give me an Oscar, well, I’d say they were crazy. But I basically just described what happened with Dustin Hoffman and his performance in Rain Man. Now, none of this is meant as a knock on Dustin Hoffman. He’s a fine actor who has done some exceptionally fine work. What I’m trying to say is that , one, I don’t think an actor of Hoffman’s caliber was necessary for the part and, two, even if they did cast him, and they did, there was no reason for anyone to think the performance was anything particularly special. Or was it?
It’s a conundrum, really, and one I can’t quite get my head around. You see, I think Peter Sellers is excellent in Being There yet I’m not much impressed by Hoffman in Rain Man and both are one note performances. And it has nothing to do with actors playing mentally impaired characters, as those performances are usually filled with connections and emotions, from Robert De Niro in Awakenings to Sean Penn in I am Sam, or even Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. Perhaps I think Sellers creates a full character that stays at one level and Hoffman does only a surface imitation of someone who stays at one level. Okay, maybe, but what exactly am I basing that on? I don’t fully know. One note performances may feel easier to create for the actor but they are the toughest performances to critique because there’s not a lot you can do to break the performance down. It is what it is and any criticism I may level at Hoffman could just as easily be leveled against Sellers by someone who feels exactly the opposite as I do about their respective performances. Could I just like Sellers as an actor more than I like Hoffman and my bias towards Sellers is influencing my judgment? Sure, that’s possible but, of course, I don’t think it’s true. Couldn’t we throw Arnold Schwarzenegger in here for his performances in the Terminator movies and sing the same praises and hurl the same insults as we could for the other two? Isn’t he playing a one-note character just as well? I mean, the robot’s not supposed to emote, and he doesn’t, and he has that cold, dead stare down pat, especially in the first one. So isn’t that a good performance too since we think the other two are good? And if it isn’t, why isn’t it? And then why aren’t the other two? I think, in the end, it comes down to this: I feel like Sellers, though playing one-note, connects to the actors. There is an interplay between Chance and the others. Chance may be a simpleton but Sellers allows him slight variations, little moments of recognition and delight. When the president (Jack Warden) or his friend and Chance’s new admirer, Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas), listen to Chance speak of gardening and ask him back if he means that the growth in spring refers to the economy, Chance, not understanding their meaning but comprehending their participation in and reaction to his statement, seems pleasantly surprised and happy that someone is talking to him at all. Sellers doesn’t overdo it, just a raised corner of the mouth to elicit a sense of satisfaction in Chance. In Rain Man, on the other hand, Hoffman feels like he said to Tom Cruise and anyone else in the film, “Hey, memorize your lines and do whatever you want, I’m going to be doing my own things regardless of you.” Now, that’s not Hoffman’s fault, if that’s what the character is, but I don’t think it makes for a very interesting performance, either.
Fortunately, for my sake at least, there are quite a bit fewer one-note performances than the multi-noters, and even fewer great actors that take them on. Before they ruined everything by giving him an emotion chip, Star Trek: The Next Generation had a great one-note performance going with Brent Spiner as android Data. He, too, played the role on one level but, like Sellers, seemed to work with the other actors, nonetheless. Whether it’s Sellers or Hoffman, Schwarzenegger or Spiner, one note performances are notoriously difficult to critique. What you say about one may or may not apply to the other and neither may make logical sense. I still don’t know for sure why I think one performance so outweighs the other but when I look at Sellers playing Chance, I feel like I’m looking at some of his finest work. Perhaps, in the end, it’s all a matter of just being there.