Give Chance A Piece...

Peter Sellers in "Being There" - a must see. In 1971, Jerzy Kosinski published the novel Being There. Soon afterwards he received a telegram from its lead character, Chance the Gardener: "Available in my garden or outside of it." A telephone number followed and when Kosinski dialed it Peter Sellers answered. It took eight years to get the project going and finally release the movie in 1979.

"Being There" is a difficult movie for reviewers to review. Some mistake it as a simple comedy and wonder why there aren't more "jokes" or some think it is a "message movie" trying to deliver a sermon. Ebert called it "counfoundingly provocative". What they fail to understand is that this is not a movie about what could happen, it's about what is happening - things like the blind acceptance of celebrity, a general disinterest in the truth and the wild lengths people will go to in order to justify themselves.

The makers are not trying to "say" anything. They are reporters relaying what they see. This is what gives the movie its inner strength, or "weird conceit" as Ebert fathoms it. This film is a towering achievement of insight - and that is what makes it so provocative.

Read more about it here.