![]() ![]() There are wonderful comic moments, but they're never pushed so far that they strain the story's premise. That's one of the most exhilarating aspects of the joy you can sense, as the filmmakers pull this off: Every scene needs the confidence to play the idea completely straight. The ways in which this movie could have gone out of control, could have been relentlessly boring on the one hand, or manic with its own audacity on the other, are endless. The whole movie has to be tailored to the narrow range within which Sellers' gardener can think, behave, speak and make choices. It has to be if the Sellers performance is to work. This is, you can see, a one-joke premise. This guy's a Thoreau! In no time at all, he's the closest confidant of a dying billionaire industrialist ( Melvyn Douglas) - and the industrialist is the closest confidant of the president. But when he stumbles into Washington's political and social upper crust, his simple truisms from the garden ("Spring is a time for planting") are taken as audaciously simple metaphors. He knows nothing about anything indeed, except gardening. The Sellers character knows almost nothing about real life, but he has watched countless hours of television and he can be pleasant, smile, shake hands and comport himself he learned from watching all those guests on talk shows. He hasn't figured out that, outside his garden, life isn't television.Īnd that is the movie's basic premise, lifted intact from a Jerzy Kosinski novel. He uses it almost immediately surrounded by hostile street kids, he imperturbably tries to switch channels to make them go away. He takes along the one possession he'll probably need: His remote-control TV channel switcher. Sellers, impeccably dressed in his employer's privately tailored wardrobe, wanders out into the city. ![]() ![]() Then one day the master of the house dies. The house and its garden are in a decaying inner city neighborhood, but what goes on outside is of no concern to Sellers: He tends his garden, he watches television, he is fed on schedule by the domestic staff he is content. Sellers plays a mentally retarded gardener who has lived and worked all of his life inside the walls of an elegant Washington town house. ![]()
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