Review – Being There

If this had been Peter Sellers’s last movie, there wouldn’t be a curse named after him. Certainly this is the last good movie he made, and it’s a quiet, subtle, high-quality capper to a legendary career. Sellers plays Chance the Gardner, a gentle, elderly, mentally-differently-abled gentleman who finds himself cast out into the cold, cruel world after the man he’d served his entire life passes away. Through a series of coincidences he ends up the toast of Washington, houseguest to a terminally-ill captain of industry, object of the old guy’s wife’s affection, advisor to the President, and accidental political pundit. Throughout he maintains a genuinely touching sense of innocence and simplicity, something that I usually find annoying but here found compelling. The odd yet oddly charming ending helped seal the deal. Worth seeing