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THE
LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS
6/10
USA
(US/UK) 2004 : Stephen HOPKINS : 122 mins
The Life
and Death of Peter Sellers must count as one of the most dauntingly
ambitious movie-projects for years. It's based on Roger Lewis's exhaustive
biography - a thick doorstep of a book which screenwriters Christopher
Markus and Stephen McFeely had to somehow boil down to manageable feature-film
length. More than two decades after his death the subject remains an emphatically
recognisable celebrity, presenting a daunting challenge to any actor even
before the complexity of Sellers' own performances - such as the multiple
roles in Dr Strangelove - is taken into account. Then there's the
fact that Sellers himself seems to have been such a deeply unsympathetic
figure, a borderline sociopath whose enormous talents, unbridled ego and
persona-swapping facility hid his own chilling lack of identity.
Add it all
up, and you get a challenge which might have taxed Orson Welles in his
prime. And Hopkins - whose previous credits include The Ghost and the
Darkness, Predator 2 and Lost In Space - is clearly no Orson
Welles, displaying an irritating fondness for incessant muzak on the soundtrack
and hand-held, distractingly soft-focus visuals. But he otherwise makes
quite a fair stab at Markus and McFeely's unwieldy, episodic screenplay,
which spends so long on Sellers' (Geoffrey Rush) first marriage - to Anne
(Emily Watson) - that it has to gallop through the latter part of his
career, stopping just short (despite the film's title) of his premature
demise.
Throughout
the narrative there are post-modern sequences in which Rush, as Sellers,
"plays" the main participants in his life, from Anne and his
domineering mother (Miriam Margolyes) and henpecked father (Peter Vaughan)
to Pink Panther director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). While this
intriguing psychological conceit doesn't quite come off, the film is never
less than a striking showcase for Rush's virtuouso performance (although
John Sessions might have been even better). Despite the slight rubberiness
of his facial prosthetics, Rush gets Sellers' many voices spot-on, and
the distinction between actor and role rapidly blurs. Though we never
remotely like this stunningly insensitive "miserable lying
shit", it's horribly absorbing - somehow enjoyably depressing - to
witness the epic scale of his dysfunction.
20th September,
2004
[seen 5th June : Vue, Leicester : press show - CinemaDays
event]
by Neil
Young
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