Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [201]
“ ‘Now get this, honky. You go tell Rafael that I ain’t taking no jive from no Western Union messenger. You tell that asshole that if he got something to tell me, to get his ass down here himself.’ Then he said that I was to get my white ass out of there quick or he’d cut it.”
The problem was, Peter couldn’t get the speech out without breaking into uncontrollable laughter; as Hoffman’s Alvin Rakoff and others have noted, Peter could be a giggler. Ashby ordered take after take as Peter attempted vainly to compose himself. The cast and crew couldn’t help laughing, too, and so the scene never worked as written, and the entire speech had to be cut. In the finished film, Chance simply lies back down on the hospital gurney and keeps his mouth shut.
This painful episode brought into stark relief the challenge Peter faced in reciting any of his lines, of which “now get this, honky,” and so on, was only the most overtly ludicrous. Throughout Being There, Peter achieves the pinpoint-sharp exactitude of nothingness. It is a performance of extraordinary dexterity. As the critic Frank Rich wrote in Time when Being There was released, “The audience must believe that Chance is so completely blank that he could indeed seem to be all things to all the people he meets. Peter Sellers’ meticulously controlled performance brings off this seemingly impossible task; as he proved in Lolita, he is a master at adapting the surreal characters of modern fiction to the naturalistic demands of movies. His Chance is sexless, affectless, and guileless to a fault. His face shows no emotion except the beatific, innocent smile of a moron. . . . Sellers’ gestures are so specific and consistent that Chance never becomes clownish or arch. He is convincing enough to make the film’s fantastic premise credible; yet he manages to get every laugh.”
As Rich astutely observes, Chance is a modern, absurdist human vacuum, but a genial and naturalistic one—a schismatic personality that Peter had to convey with strenuous vocal and gestural technique. To break Chance’s strict, meditation-like state would be to destroy Chance’s being. A lesser actor would have made the character’s mental dysfunction flamboyant and drastic. A Hollywood ham, all but winking directly at the camera, would find a way to reiterate soundlessly what a magnificent performance the audience was lucky enough to witness—how fantastically smart the actor had to be to play a dullard. Think of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988). Peter Sellers’s intelligence was always deeper, his onscreen confidence greater, his technique much more finely honed.
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The President of the United States (Warden) shows up at the mansion to marshal Ben Rand’s political and financial support. There he meets Chance. As the three titans discuss national affairs, the conversation turns to the best way to stimulate economic growth. Chance pauses for a moment, moves his eyes slightly, pauses again—all meaningless gestures that register as cogitation—and says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well—and all will be well—in the garden.”
The president is taken aback, forced to regard Chance’s remark as a metaphor in order for the statement to make any sense at all. Chance follows through: “In a garden, growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer. But then