Everyone’s got to be a fan of Peter Sellers, the man was a comic genius even if he did seem to be burning out just before his death at 54 in 1980. He made so many classics, among them The Mouse Who Roared (which deserves much more acclaim than it seems to get), Dr. Strangelove (which does get the acclaim it deserves), the four Pink Panther features (a role he got at the last minute when Peter Ustinov–you’ve got too be kidding me–backed out) and Being There (his last serious effort).
HBO continues its tradition of producing the best made for television movies with The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, a real yet somewhat surreal biography starring Geoffrey Rush (have you seen him in Lantana?) as Sellers, Charlize Theron as Sellers’ utterly stunning second wife Britt Eklund, Emily Watson as first wife Anne, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards (writer/director of the Pink Panther flicks, among many other great films), Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubric (who directed Strangelove) and the absolutely exquisite Sonia Aquino as Sophia Loren.
The movie is based on a serious biography by Roger Lewis and focuses on Sellers the man; it isn’t a frothy recap of his films but a psychological portrait of a man who thinks he really isn’t there. By the climax, when we see Sellers reading and then becoming determined to make the film of Jerzy Kosinsky’s novel Being There, director Stephen Hopkins no longer needs to make explicit the actor’s inner emptiness (as he’d done frequently at earlier points) nor his remarkable similarity to the book’s lead character–Rush and Hopkins collaborate to show us via facial expressions, (lack of) conversational ability and physical isolation.
Another interesting device Hopkins uses is to play on Sellers’ own common ploy of playing multiple parts in a movie by having Rush take over another character’s monologue, dressed and made up as that other character, switching while the camera briefly swings away from their face. The first time this happened, as Sellers’ father speaks, I almost didn’t catch it but once alerted it was noticed each time. The monologues by themselves are another device as they’re spoken directly to the audience (breaking the fourth wall is the term, I believe) and a mixed bag since they deliver a good bit of that explicit messaging that Hollywood insists film audiences require. Truly great films generally understand we don’t, so let’s just put this down as pretty good.
recommended
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