The unbearable blightness of "Being"

“Being Human” begins in one of the most frustrating ways i’ve ever seen a film begin. It’s all round-about narration. You imagine Bill Forsyth believes he’s trying to hint at something deeper with it, and the film, but no matter how deep you look, it just feels shallow. It has Robin Williams playing five men, all named Hector, in different periods of history and it comes off like Mel Brooks’ “History of the World” in pretentious form.

Nearly each one of the five stories seem to proceed in exactly the same way. The first is by far the worst- Williams plays a cave dweller who stares on helpless as his wife and children are taken by a gang of marauders. As this storyline ends, all I felt was extreme apathy at the pointless nothingness I just watched and apprehension for what was to come.

It could only go up, but only marginally so. He’s next a slave in Roman times. His master (John Turturro) has gone bankrupt and is keen on sacrificing himself. Only problem is the master wants Hector to die with him. What the master doesn’t know is that Hector is seeing the master’s black concubine on the side.

Later, Hector is a Scottish crusader who again feels like a slave, only this time to circumstance, until he decides to break free and follow a Dutch-speaking woman to Holland. He is then a Portuguese man in the Renaissance shipwrecked on the coast of Africa where Hector deals with mutineers and a spurned lover. Lastly, and this one goes so far into the future that it causes the biggest laugh in the film, Hector is a modern day man in New York trying to reconnect with his children after serving a prison term.


There’s no real connective thread to any of this other than throughout the ages Hector seems to deal with the same alienation from family over and over again. It’s clear we’re seeing the same soul in the same body over and over again but are we meant to discern that other people in his past are also being reincarnated as people in his life? Is Hector learning anything from each reincarnation? If so, what?
The problem is that each of these characters is so colorless that Hector has no motivation, feeling, or thought. He’s a cypher living from one world to the next, we’re supposed to find it interesting that his name continues to be Hector and he looks like the same man in each one but his stories unfold without point, reason, or even much in the way of relatable humanity.


So bad is this problem that the voiceover narration coyly delivered by Theresa Russell continues to intrude on the film, obnoxiously trying to point out unity and importance where there is barely any. You get the feeling the narration was forced upon the film because no one would understand what the hell is happening otherwise and a quick google search on the production points out that that is exactly what Warner Brothers did to this film. But with lines like “Well, said the story to itself, ‘I guess I must be a love story”, you imagine the editor of this film needing a lot of liquor to get through this one.


Williams relished the opportunity to be a more dramatic actor but this just requires him to look lost and glum. There’s no character to play, just a bunch of stories that you would need a whole dissertation to figure out the meaning of. What’s even stranger about this film is that for all its pretentiousness, there are moments of goofy humor that seem so out of place that you wonder if the studio forced that upon it as well.


“Being Human”, I admit, takes a big swing with its reincarnation theme but it’s clear this one has problems with the execution of how that should go right from the beginning. This is truly a mess of a movie- a lumbering, plotless, lifeless, unbelievably ill-conceived sleeping pill of a film that doesn’t work even slightly. Is it one of the worst of all time? A film with so little reason for being may actually be so.