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Essential viewing: Peter Sellers, 'Being There' and the hazards of metaphor

Chance, the savant gardener-turned-sagacious power broker played by Peter Sellers in Being There, doesn't speak in metaphors. His brain isn't wired that way. But every time he talks about gardening - strong roots, the arrival of spring, flowers in bloom - his listeners hear metaphor.

Essential is a new series from Dallas Morning News critics spotlighting timeless works of art and culture.

Essential viewing:  Being There, directed by Hal Ashby, 1979.

Metaphors can be sharp and pithy; sometimes they can even be meaningful. They can also substitute for saying what you really mean, a strategy that politicians, who rarely say what they really mean, have mastered.

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Chance, the savant gardener-turned-sagacious power broker played by Peter Sellers in Being There, doesn't speak in metaphors. His brain isn't wired that way. But every time he talks about gardening — strong roots, the arrival of spring, flowers in bloom — his listeners hear metaphor. That is, they hear what they want to hear. This makes Chance a perfect if unlikely adviser to the president of the United States.

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Let's back up a little.

Being There, the 1979 film to be released as a Criterion Blu-ray on Tuesday, began life as a 1971 novel by Jerzy Kosínski. Sellers brought it to the director Hal Ashby in 1973, a fortuitous choice even if it took six years for the movie version to arrive. Ashby (The Last Detail, Shampoo) had a gift for movies that let politics and social issues roil just beneath a loosey-goosey surface. Even with the president (Jack Warden) in the picture, much of the movie's meaning is lodged between Chance's lines. As Mark Harris writes in his astute essay included with the Blu-ray, "Being There is elastic enough to feel as if it is perpetually about our moment, as long as our moment includes campaigns, elections and politicians."

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Check. Check. And check.

(Courtesy of the Criterion Collection)

Chance is among Sellers' most sublime creations, a deadpan simpleton endowed with  gravitas by other people's projections. At the beginning of the film he's forced out of the only home he's known when his benefactor dies. He stays put for a while, watching TV (his only activity besides gardening), then wanders out onto the D.C. streets as a funked-up fusion version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" blares over the soundtrack. It's his first time away from home. Ever. Soon a limousine hits him (as he watches himself on a store window security camera) and he's whisked to the home of a dying business titan (Melvyn Douglas, who won an Oscar for his performance) and his much younger wife (Shirley MacLaine). They, like just everybody else, mistake his every utterance for genius.

My favorite exchange in Being There comes when a D.C. power player asks Chance if he'd consider writing a book describing his political philosophy. "I can't write," Chance replies. Of course not, the man replies, who can these days? He offers to provide a ghostwriter. "I can't read," Chance explains. Yes, the man replies. Who has the time? Bluntly stating his illiteracy, Chance is mistaken for an over-extended mover and shaker. And so it goes.

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Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel created a shroud of darkness for much of the film, shades of black well served by this digital transfer.  Viewed today, Being There is haunted by a pall of death. Sellers, plagued by a heart illness, died seven months after the movie's release. Ashby died in 1988; Being There was his last good movie. Kosínski, who wrote the script with an uncredited Robert C. Jones, committed suicide in 1991.

But the movie itself ends on a note of mystical whimsy that has been debated ever since. It cements Chance's identity as a holy fool, followed by a retinue of unholy hangers-on. Chance speaks the truth. It's not his fault if the interpretation is illusion.