THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS

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Originally uploaded by Struthers.

When director Stephen Hopkins approached Geoffrey Rush (Shine, Quills) to take on the title roll in the film The Life and Death of Peter Sellers he was understandably apprehensive. He'd be in every scene as the tormented comic actor, as well as portraying many of the iconic characters Peter Sellers created, and then he'd be asked at times to play some of the key characters in his personal life as well.
If it came off then Mr Rush could be well expected to start polishing his shoes and practicing self-deprecating remarks for the upcoming awards season.
Rush manages to pull all this off, and then some. As well as his uncanny performance of Sellers himself, the scenes in which Rush plays Dr Strangelove and Inspector Cleusau are pure delight.
There are other actors, notably Charlize Theron (Monster) as Britt Eckland and Emily Watson as his first wife Anne, but they come and go, merely providing a sounding board of sanity for Sellers childish antics and tantrums to bounce off.
The early years of Sellers radio career as one of the Goons along with Spike Milligan (Edward Tudor Pole) and Harry Secombe (Steve Pemberton) is glossed over rather quickly, it's from when his film career and ego really began to take off the makers were interested in. And the difficulty of finding someone on the planet who resembled the gaunt and gangly Milligan appears to have been nigh on impossible.
Wonderfully torturous scenes such as those when Sellers believes himself to be in the midst of a torrid affair with the unrequiting and happily married Sophia Loren (Sonia Aquino), provide a real glimpse into a severely scarred psyche.
His mother manipulates him, his wives manage him, his directors suffer him and his psychic rips him off, but in the end do we care? Hopkins does such a terrific job at establishing how much of an insufferable bastard Sellers was that it's difficult to have any empathy towards him, and he's in every frame.
As Sellers himself points out, if he doesn't have a character play, then there isn't much else there. In the end we're left with quite a lot of screen time of Sellers treating people, especially his children, horribly.
Three and a half stars