Being There (1979)

I am back from the Bahamas relaxed, refreshed, and tanned.  Or I will be as soon as this sunburn fades.  It was an excellent trip and if this were a travel blog, I'd tell you all about it.  But it's not.

  I watched this before I left but I didn't get a chance to draft it.

Chase (Peter Sellers) is a gardener in a Washington DC mansion. He is, politely, slow-witted. He takes care of the garden and Louise the maid (Ruth Attaway) takes care of him and the Old Man. But when the Old Man dies, the lawyers descend, and Chase is suddenly an anomaly. He has no records of any kind and seems to have never been out of the house before. Seeing as he has no legal claim to the house and is therefore not their problem, they boot him out onto the street. He wanders DC for a while before managing to get hit by a limo belonging to socialite Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine). Rather than take him to a hospital, Eve decides to take him home to the team of private physicians working for her ailing, and much older, husband Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). She mistakes "Chance the gardener" for Chauncey Gardner, and suddenly, Chance is transformed into a businessman down on his luck.  Everything out of his mouth is either the advice of a sage or a sparkling witticism. It's like Forrest Gump for the 70's.

This is one of those movies where you watch it and it's not terribly funny, but then when you try and explain it to a friend, it sounds hilarious. Droll is probably the best way to describe it.