Hal Ashby's Being There (1979)

One of the contemporary directors I most admired, Hal Ashby, a maker of offbeat character studies with strong elements of antiestablishment social satire, was milling around afterward raving about Star Wars, and I was thinking, "Doesn't he know this film will destroy his career?" As the Reagan era approached in the late seventies. like an inexorable Death Star, an even more risk-adverse timidity took over the industry.
--Joseph McBride

Being There was one of the last interesting films of the seventies.  It stars Peter Sellers, who died the next year at age 55; was written by Jerzy Kosinski, who committed suicide twelve years later at age 59; directed by Hal Ashby, who died in 1988 at the age of 58. I don't think most of the films by the directors who flourished in the seventies --Bogdanovitch, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Friedkin, Ashby -- are artistically successful but they were made with passion and intelligence, especially when one compares them with the meretricious quality of what one sees at the multiplex today.

Being There is basically a one-joke shaggy dog story.  Peter Sellers plays Chance, a retarded, illiterate and possibly autistic gardener who ventures out into the world when his wealthy patron dies.  Sellers' character only watches television and can't even feed himself.  He is rescued in the street by Shirley MacLaine and taken home to live with her and her wealthy and dying tycoon husband, played by veteran Melvyn Douglas.  Everyone thinks Chance is brilliant because he has nothing to say about anything except what he knows about from watching the banalities of television.  Even his attempted seduction by MacLaine is met with "I like to watch" and MacLaine obliges him. Peter Sellers' one-note minimalist performance, only surpassed by his low-key role in Blake Edwards's The Party (1968), reminds one of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot (1869) and the donkey in Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, characters who appropriated the sins of those around them; the ending of Being There suggesting that Chance can literally walk on water.