The 1979 film Being There—which received a superb new Blu-Ray release last week from the Criterion Collection—feels more funereal than virtually any other movie comedy I know. Set during winter and shot with clear, chilly precision by Caleb Deschanel, it generally looks like an Ingmar Bergman psychodrama; the jokes, albeit funny and perfectly timed, seem oddly out of place. The film is also structured around death: it begins with the death of one character and ends at the burial of another, whose rapid demise influences much of the onscreen behavior in the second half. Peter Sellers, who gave his last great performance in Being There, died about a year after it was released. Moreover, the movie marked the end of a seven-film winning streak for Hal Ashby (director of such New Hollywood classics as Harold and Maude and The Last Detail), who would never again make another commercial or critical success before his death in 1988 at age 59. Not just the swan song for a number of talented filmmakers, Being There might be considered the death knell for New Hollywood itself.
The film has at least one layer of meaning lacking in the novel—it can be read as a veiled personal statement from its star. Sellers first got his hands on the book in 1972 and had wanted to make a movie of it ever since. He thought that he was a perfect fit for Chance, in large part because he saw the character’s blankness as a reflection of his own. Sellers remains the cinema’s greatest chameleon—his filmography contains literally dozens of performances that show the actor transforming his speech and his body language so thoroughly as to seem a different person. In Being There Sellers inhabits the role of Chance with otherworldly calm; his voice is flat and accentless, a bit like HAL 9000’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he moves with a gardener’s fastidiousness. And yet there’s also a sweetness about Chance that makes him likable despite his lack of empathy. Included in the Criterion Collection release is a 1980 Today show interview between Sellers and Gene Shalit. At one point Shalit refers to a recent Time magazine profile that argued Sellers had no real personality. “Nope, there’s nothing there,” Sellers responds, with perfect comic timing. It’s a poignant footnote to his performance in Being There.
