Cinema Revisited: Being There (1979)

Peter Sellers' penultimate film would have worked better as his last. It is an apt culmination that caps his career playing both comedy and drama. He combines them for his performance in this compelling story about the simple minded Chance, a gardener. Chance spent his entire life living in the home of a wealthy man who took care of him. The film opens with this man having died, so Chance must leave the home. Chance has never lived anywhere else, and has never really left the premises. He gardens and obsessively watches television. TV is his only outlet.

Sellers' approach to the Chance character shows his Stan Laurel influence. Both characters were so naive as to the way of society, they maintained an innocent inner peace. Chance exhibits this as he searches for a new place in life, having lost all that he knew or understood. His fortunes change when he steps into the road and is hit by a car that happens to belong to a wealthy businessman. This man has such power, he calls the President by his first name. Chance's simple minded dialog about "the lawyers closed up my house" is interpreted as having lost his business. He is taken in by yet another wealthy benefactor, and that same simple mindedness causes him to rise in the business and political world, as everyone responds to his simplicity as profundity.

There is something darkly humorous about the entire film, and the Stan Laurel connection is pretty obvious, Sellers capturing the sad-faced comedian's nuanced mannerisms. Women find him attractive; politicians find him to be a visionary, and businessmen believe him to be shrewd. But he is just a simple man talking about simple things with no underlying meaning.

Shirley MacLaine is at her very best as the wealthy man's wife, who falls in love with Chance, while Melvyn Douglas culminates his long, impressive career with one of his finest performances.

Peter Sellers tried for years to get a film version of Jerry Kozinski's novel produced (Kozinkski also wrote the screenplay). However, by the 1970s, Sellers made a series of terrible movies that stretched to the middle of the decade, and no studio was interested in any of his projects. Then in 1975 he and Blake Edwards decided to revive the Inspector Clouseau character for the first time in eleven years with "Return of the Pink Panther." It was such a huge hit, there was a sequel, "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" a year later. Sellers also scored with an all-star ensemble cast in "Murder by Death" (1975). So, despite a decade that include such terrible movies as "The Blockhouse" and "Where Does It Hurt," Sellers redeemed himself at the box office with these hit films, and "Being There" got made.

Sellers was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Dustin Hoffman for "Kramer vs Kramer." An Oscar was given to his co-star Melvyn Douglas, mostly because it was assumed Douglas wouldn't live much longer. He did die two years later, but nobody could have predicted that Sellers would die a year before Douglas.

The religious imagery during the last shot of "Being There" is a bit off-putting and the bloopers during the end credits, while funny, affect the mood that had been established. However, "Being There" is still a great film to wrap up the great cinematic decade of the 1970s. It is also a good film to culminate Peter Sellers' career. Although he would make one more film, the posthumlously released The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, it is rather forgettable while Being There remains timeless.