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The characters who mistake the hero's stupidity for wisdom are also finely drawn. Melvyn Douglas and Shirley MacLaine, as a dying right-wing industrialist and his wife, adopt Chance into their absurdly grandiose mansion and make repeated fools of themselves without ever losing their charm. Jack Warden is at his dryest as a befuddled U.S. President who mistakes Chance's non sequiturs for political profundities. Being There also features an almost Hogarthian selection of minor dupes. During the course of his odyssey, Chance manages to arouse the admiration or fear of Washington hostesses, a gay suitor, the Soviet ambassador, the FBI, the CIA and a book publisher who offers him a six-figure advance. Since Sellers' Chance, like the actor's Inspector Clouseau, is never aware of the chaos he unleashes, the hilarity increases exponentially. So does the ferocity of Kosinski's attack on television. Unlike Paddy Chayefsky's fatuous Network, Being There points up the true danger of the medium. Kosinski understands that TV does not make audiences "mad as hell" but instead reduces them to docile, passive children. If a benign dolt like Chance can unwittingly manipulate a nation of TV watchers, a telegenic villain could have a field day.
Director Ashby (Shampoo, Coming Home) so well understands Kosinski's aes thetic that he never has to spell out the movie's moral. This exquisitely timed film offers endlessly delicate variations on its single theme. Some scenes are classic. When Sellers tries to escape a real-life street gang by pushing a button on a remote-control channel selector, it is a brilliant exaggeration of the reflex every TV viewer uses to tune out reality. When the hero ignores MacLaine's bedroom advances to watch a kids' show, the impact of TV on American sexual appetites is reduced to its ultimate absurdity. MacLaine is worse off than a football widow — she's a Mister Rogers widow. Like his star, Ashby never reaches to pull off his best mo ments. If anything, he is too refined. With a bit more plot and a few accelerations in pace, Being There would be as perfectly realized a satire as Dr. Strangelove. Even so, it is hard to complain about a film whose only flaw is an excess of artistic integrity.
—Frank Rich