The Celluloid President

Peter Sellers in "Being There"

Gary Holmes

In possibly his greatest movie role, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a simple-minded gardener whose mundane observations are taken as oracular epigrams and metaphors that take the political establishment by storm. "Being There" has a lot to say about our gullibility and our habit of hearing what we want to hear. Once widely lauded as a hilarious and biting commentary about politics, the movie is now rarely in the conversation about great political films but it is as timely today as it was in 1979.