People now look back at "Being There" as the "Forrest Gump" of its day but Hal Ashby's brilliant satire with a heart is everything "Forrest Gump" wasn't. For starters, in place of a mugging and obvious Tom Hanks we get a subtle and magnificent Peter Sellers in a career-best performance as the child-like Chance 'the gardener' who has lived all his life in the seclusion of his employer's home and who now finds himself abandoned in a chilly Washington D.C. after the old man's death. Injured after an automobile accident and with nothing to fall back on but aphorisms learned, or just picked up, from decades of watching television, he is 'rescued' by Shirley MacLaine and her ancient husband Melvyn Douglas and is somehow mistaken for something of a seer by his new-found friends and even by the American President, (Jack Warden).
Adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his own novel, "Being There" is Hal Ashby's masterpiece and remains one of the key American films of the seventies. Very funny and deeply insightful and bolstered by Sellers' extraordinary performance it went to places other American films with a political edge simply didn't go to in those days and above all it treated Sellers' character with a great deal more than just compassion; both the film and Sellers gave Chance grace notes. In fact, it's much closer to the recent "Happy as Lazzaro", another masterpiece about a potential saint. See this at all costs.
People now look back at "Being There" as the "Forrest Gump" of its day but Hal Ashby's brilliant satire with a heart is everything "Forrest Gump" wasn't. For starters, in place of a mugging and obvious Tom Hanks we get a subtle and magnificent Peter Sellers in a career-best performance as the child-like Chance 'the gardener' who has lived all his life in the seclusion of his employer's home and who now finds himself abandoned in a chilly Washington D.C. after the old man's death. Injured after an automobile accident and with nothing to fall back on but aphorisms learned, or just picked up, from decades of watching television, he is 'rescued' by Shirley MacLaine and her ancient husband Melvyn Douglas and is somehow mistaken for something of a seer by his new-found friends and even by the American President, (Jack Warden).
Adapted by Jerzy Kosinski from his own novel, "Being There" is Hal Ashby's masterpiece and remains one of the key American films of the seventies. Very funny and deeply insightful and bolstered by Sellers' extraordinary performance it went to places other American films with a political edge simply didn't go to in those days and above all it treated Sellers' character with a great deal more than just compassion; both the film and Sellers gave Chance grace notes. In fact, it's much closer to the recent "Happy as Lazzaro", another masterpiece about a potential saint. See this at all costs.
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