Mr. Bean is a well-meaning yet clumsy and destructive security guard working at the National Gallery in London. The gallery's board of directors, who despise Bean for sleeping on the job, wish to fire him but are thwarted by their chairman. They instead select Bean as their representative for the transfer of James McNeill Whistler's 1871 portrait Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (also called Whistler's Mother) to the Grierson Art Gallery in Los Angeles once purchased by philanthropist General Newton for $50 million.