There There

Back in college, I had a drama professor who at fairly regular intervals would praise the performance of Peter Sellers in a movie called Being There. I'd never heard of it, and didn't really have the time to track it down. Nevertheless, the movie did stick in some deep corner of my mind enough that when I was tossing a pile of movies into the Netflix queue not long ago, Being There made the list.

If you, like me, have never heard of the movie, here's some background. Made in 1979, this was the last movie starring Peter Sellers to be released before his death. He plays a simpleton gardener with the mind of child, whose wealthy employer dies at the start of the movie, putting him out onto the street with no place to go, or even any idea how to get by in society. But a random sequence of events has him fall in with another wealthy couple who mistake him for a brilliant down-on-his-luck businessman; they take him in and hilaridramedy ensues.

I may not have heard of this movie, but I get the very distinct impression that the writer of Forrest Gump did. There are some uncanny similarities between the two. While Gump is played mainly for drama where Being There goes mainly for laughs, the two both revolve around idiots with charmed lives. They even both get to meet United States presidents.

I didn't much care for Forrest Gump, and I didn't much care for Being There either. The reasons are rather different, though. Primarily, I just didn't find Being There to be that funny. Clocking in at over two hours long, the movie just can't sustain the shallow, one-note "mistaken for a brilliant man" gag. It's worth a polite smile here and there, and not much more.

But there are at least two worthy elements of the film. One, as promised by that old college professor, is indeed the work of Peter Sellers. It's a perfect, guileless performance that seems completely real. He never plays for laughs, only for realism, and this actor who in the past slipped so chameleon-like into so many other roles (sometimes in the same movie) completely disappears into this one too.

The other element, perhaps oddly, is a healthy dose of cynicism. Without going into particulars, I'll just refer back to that plot point that involves Sellers' character meeting the president. It turns out that politics is a major undercurrent in the plot, and the film takes a very dim view of it in general, and politicians in particular. Not that I have any illusions about the subject being somehow more "pure" back in the late 1970s, but I certainly feel that the movie was a bit prescient on the matter, looking at the thirty years since.

Still, while these two factors made the movie watchable, I wouldn't say they lifted it to a place where I'd actually recommend it. If you're a Peter Sellers fan, then you've probably already seen it anyway; this is perhaps rightly considered one of his best films. For the rest of you, I'll just call it a C+ and let you do with that what you will.