The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 127m
Director: Stephen Hopkins
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, John Lithgow, Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry, Sonia Aquino, Peter Vaughan, Stanley Tucci, Emily Watson
Synopsis:
The career of radio and film star Peter Sellers is propelled by his dissatisfaction with who he is and retreat behind a series of masks; the effect on his private life, however, is to make him and everyone around him unhappy.
Review:
In this, as in the book on which it is based, the trajectory of the comedian into the realms of unreality (film star, potential suitor for Sophia Loren, sixties sex symbol) is blamed in great measure on the overweening influence of his mother, Peg. The film resolves itself into a series of episodes centring on the formative successes of Sellers's career, and one or two failures, with fully reconstructed clips and at times eye-popping verisimilitude. (The film Being There is seen as a homage to his downtrodden father, and the closest thing, in its pared-down anonymity, to the truth of how the actor saw himself, providing a fitting but very sad conclusion to his film/life). For some reason it then interrupts the action at intervals to step outside the film to reveal Rush playing Sellers playing the various characters in a way the latter would have liked things to appear. This is a distraction and pretty much an irrelevance, since it adds nothing we didn't know already about the actor's self-delusion. Elsewhere the biopic is never less than watchable, sometimes painful, often very funny in the brilliance of the impersonation.
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 127m
Director: Stephen Hopkins
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, John Lithgow, Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry, Sonia Aquino, Peter Vaughan, Stanley Tucci, Emily Watson
Synopsis:
The career of radio and film star Peter Sellers is propelled by his dissatisfaction with who he is and retreat behind a series of masks; the effect on his private life, however, is to make him and everyone around him unhappy.
Review:
In this, as in the book on which it is based, the trajectory of the comedian into the realms of unreality (film star, potential suitor for Sophia Loren, sixties sex symbol) is blamed in great measure on the overweening influence of his mother, Peg. The film resolves itself into a series of episodes centring on the formative successes of Sellers's career, and one or two failures, with fully reconstructed clips and at times eye-popping verisimilitude. (The film Being There is seen as a homage to his downtrodden father, and the closest thing, in its pared-down anonymity, to the truth of how the actor saw himself, providing a fitting but very sad conclusion to his film/life). For some reason it then interrupts the action at intervals to step outside the film to reveal Rush playing Sellers playing the various characters in a way the latter would have liked things to appear. This is a distraction and pretty much an irrelevance, since it adds nothing we didn't know already about the actor's self-delusion. Elsewhere the biopic is never less than watchable, sometimes painful, often very funny in the brilliance of the impersonation.
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 127m
Director: Stephen Hopkins
Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, John Lithgow, Miriam Margolyes, Stephen Fry, Sonia Aquino, Peter Vaughan, Stanley Tucci, Emily Watson
Synopsis:
The career of radio and film star Peter Sellers is propelled by his dissatisfaction with who he is and retreat behind a series of masks; the effect on his private life, however, is to make him and everyone around him unhappy.
Review:
In this, as in the book on which it is based, the trajectory of the comedian into the realms of unreality (film star, potential suitor for Sophia Loren, sixties sex symbol) is blamed in great measure on the overweening influence of his mother, Peg. The film resolves itself into a series of episodes centring on the formative successes of Sellers's career, and one or two failures, with fully reconstructed clips and at times eye-popping verisimilitude. (The film Being There is seen as a homage to his downtrodden father, and the closest thing, in its pared-down anonymity, to the truth of how the actor saw himself, providing a fitting but very sad conclusion to his film/life). For some reason it then interrupts the action at intervals to step outside the film to reveal Rush playing Sellers playing the various characters in a way the latter would have liked things to appear. This is a distraction and pretty much an irrelevance, since it adds nothing we didn't know already about the actor's self-delusion. Elsewhere the biopic is never less than watchable, sometimes painful, often very funny in the brilliance of the impersonation.