According to legend, the film Being There was the film project Peter Sellers believed he was born for. After reading Jerzy Kosinski's novel of the same name, Peter Sellers sent an "anonymous" telegram to Kosinski, signing it "Chance the Gardener" and leaving a telephone number. After Kosinski called the number and learned it was Peter Sellers, a long process began as they worked to convince film studios that the novel would work as a movie. Finally, Warner Brothers agreed and after many years, the shooting of Being There began.
Consumed by the lead character and in essence becoming him, Peter Sellers gives what many critics feel is his best ever performance. A Golden Globe for Best Actor and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor would follow. However, some fans of Peter Sellers' slapstick Pink Panther films just did not get it. Where were the pratfalls and the bizarre costumes? Where was the over the top madness? The subtlety of this film's humor drifted over many of their heads.
Chance the Gardener has spent his entire life living in the townhouse of a wealthy man in Washington, DC. He has never been out in the real world, and his background is a mystery. According to government files, he simply does not exist.
"The old man" who let Chance stay in his home and tend to his gardens dies and lawyers come to "close the house." Chance is thrust out into the street with nowhere to go and no concept of how to survive.
Chance is a simple man. Is he mentally challenged, or does he just see things in a way most of us cannot due to the many layers of experience and education we have received? This is the puzzle that eventually becomes the turning point of the film.
After her limousine accidently runs over Chance's foot, Shirley MacLaine takes him in. She is the wife of a older, powerful Washington power broker, played masterfully by Melvyn Douglas, who is coming close to the end of his life. Mistaking Chance's introduction of himself as "Chance the Gardener" to be "Chauncey Gardner," Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas become enraptured with Chance. He becomes seen as a visionary who cuts through the crap and sidesteps politics to present a handful of simple truisms. You must tend to the garden, plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. In the winter, the garden dies and you must wait for spring. This astute observation becomes the explanation for the country's economic woes that everyone has been so desperately seeking.
Spoiler
In the end, we find the groundswell movement to propel Chance the Gardener into the presidency. This despite the realization of several prominent figures that Chance is nothing more than a simple gardener who once tried to ward off street thugs with a television remote control. He really just wants to watch television and tend to the garden. In the end one begins to wonder. Perhaps that is the kind of leader we need...