Hal Ashby is the director who gave us the wonderfully quirky and eccentric ode to the 60's in Harold and Maude now follows up a decade later in somewhat similar vein with the film that became an ode and almost tribute to its star Peter Sellars who died the year after its release. The film follows the exploits of a truly moronic gardener by the name of Chance who somehow mumbles his way through with his monosyllabic inanities to the highest echelons of influence within the most exalted corridors of power and government.

This irony of the film being that the retarded babblings of a moron can assume magnificently important meaning if they are interpreted in the "appropriate" way. Here, the moronic Chance's killer line is somewhat akin to "if you take care of the roots, than you will have a prosperous result" which takes on enormous significance in the American presidents economic policy. Yet Chance remains utterly oblivious to his new found importance and celebrity as a genius in the realm of politics and economics. Sellars is the star attraction of the film from beginning to end and his performance sees the actor at his most understated and yet brilliantly effective. This was after all his forte, to be able to bring down the house and yet not even utter more than a syllable if even that. In this film the humour permeates to the core of the film yet there are no overt and obvious laughs which is to the director's credit that he avoids pandering to crowd pleasing tactics.

Ashby directs with admirable subtlety yet there is an underlying cynicism to the film that goes hand in hand with the humour and permeates the movie through and through. The film is a triumph for Sellars and Ashby as well as Melvyn Douglas who portray their characters quite excellently yet perhaps it benefited from timing as due to Peter Sellars death in 1980 the film ended up serving as the swansong for one of the finest actors of an era. Shirley MacLaine lends good support as the ailing senator's wife who also develops a crush on the seemingly irresistible Chance. The film goes a long way to explaining how a brain dead turnip like Ronald Reagan was elected as the president of the USA.

Scathing political satire is the obvious angle, and the film succeeds to a large extent, yet somewhere in all that subtlety and downplayed humour the message gets somewhat diluted along the way and the punch line never really materializes. Pardon me for being moronic but I tend to prefer films to have discernable endings - this movie just decides to end and leaves the viewer wondering (to some extent) what happens next. At least this viewer was left wondering what precipitated the end of the movie. The film also labours from time to time as one joke the movie basically runs on starts running out of steam just a bit and therefore one is treated to the weakest moments of the film involving Shirley MacLaine trying desperately to seduce Chance - a scene almost akin to child molestation. Certainly not the most incisive political satire ever put on film nor the most insightful nor the most entertaining, yet it will always be remembered as the swansong for a man who showed us his true brilliance in Kubrik's infinitely superior Dr. Strangelove. Recommended, but not wildly so.