Today, there is something which pisses me off almost as much as the people protesting Obama's "death panels," and that is the fact that Peter Sellers died in 1980. For the year before, in Hal Ashby's Being There, he gives a performance which joins the ranks of Burton, Streep, and Brando on the list of immortal film acting.
Sellers, clean-shaven, hair turned silver, his face almost expressionless but for the desire and sympathy he can't keep from his eyes, his voice the same as when he played Quilty and Muffley for Stanley Kubrick, spends the first twenty minutes doing nothing and everything. He goes through the motions, the speech patterns, establishes the limits and rudimentary code of values Chance the Gardener lives by. Then the pattern of his life is broken…a new situation emerges…and for the rest of the movie, Chance acts the same while the world reacts to him differently, for due to a weird but plausible change of events, this simple-minded man who knows nothing except how to lovingly tend a garden and anything they show on the televisions he can't live without becomes, potentially, the most powerful man in the world. The greatness of the movie comes from Sellers never breaking character, never being aware that everything has changed and that Chance's position in life has skyrocketed to imperial levels. He makes us believe that Chance is having ordinary (for him) conversations until he can get back to watching TV…conversations where he advises presidents and power brokers. At times, Sellers, with his dapper hat and suits, reminds me of a modern-day Charlie Chaplin, and Being There is the ultimate expression of Chaplin's visions of little fools triumphing over the mighty.
Being There is a very angry movie on one hand, but a celebratory movie on the other. Angry because of Ashby and novelist/screenwriter Jerzy Kosinzski's subtext: in a world where the mass media and the corporation seize more and more power, both forces suddenly find themselves paying absolute heed to a person who is COMPLETELY THEIR CREATION. Chance can neither read nor write, has no dealings with doctors or lawyers, does not have an intellectual understanding of love and friendship. He just likes to watch TV! But because the increasing mental force-feeding and social breakdown of the media-driven, corporate world is blinding us to see each other clearly, everyone who meets Chance thinks he's a genius, a powerful man of mystery, someone not to be trifled with. He is the ultimate expression of a fragmented, docile generation, and his ultimateness strikes awe into people, horrible as it is. Ashby and Kosinzski, to some degree, abhor this state of affairs where a virtual idiot can become our master while we lap it up…
BUT…though Chance may not have much of a brain, his "watching" gives him perception. He has a heart which makes him feel for others…Sellers may never have been more moving than when we see Chance cry at the end of the movie. And most of all, for all his creation, Chance is his own man with a highly individual point of view…and for that reason alone his ascendancy is a triumph. For the same media-driven, corporate world which created him is dedicated to homogenizing humanity and culture. The other characters are all either caught in this trap (especially Jack Warden's president) or are smart enough to be aware of it but unable to do much about it except try to influence things. Chance's power is that by being so simple, so direct, and so individual, his difference attracts people. His odd integrity makes others see him as someone special. They draw actual strength from his own strength, find happiness and fulfillment from his own happiness and fulfillment. No wonder that even the wary Dr. Allenby can't bring himself to tell anyone the truth about Chance when he becomes the only one who knows that "Chauncey Gardiner" is the opposite of what he seems. He is just as amazed and moved that a man like this can still exist, can bring out the best in others by merely being himself. The final message of Being There is that life is indeed a state of mind. We can live it as conventionally as we choose and play into the prevailing point of view. But if, like Chance, we live on our own terms and, while caring for and respecting others, never sacrifice our individuality, we find the best and simplest happiness of all…and we spread that happiness to others…and by changing others, we might change the world. Just as Chance does in the final scene, when suddenly the world starts marching to his tune. Why then, couldn't he…but I won't give it away.
Peter Sellers once said he was born to play Chance. He also said that he had no personality except for the character he was inhabiting at the time. How beautiful, how overwhelming it must have been to play a character whose personality does nothing but rejuvenate the lives of those around him, to play someone with a purpose.
(I also must praise Melvyn Douglas, who won a well-deserved Oscar as Chance's dying benefactor, a man of contradictory spirits and a pure heart.)
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