Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Michelle Ridley The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

jubilee77 The life and death of Peter Sellers was a film based on the controversial biography by Roger Lewis of the same name about a comic genius whom had an ability to deliver comedy film at its best. His best known roles so far was the inept French detective in the series of Pink Panther films as Inspector Clouseau.Yet despite his achievements in comedy roles, Sellers had actually ended up as a sad, lonely and tragic figure plagued by heart trouble, marital and personality issues that many years after his death, there had been some debate that he may have been suffering from some form of personality disorders.The film has some excellent and sometimes very brief insights plus some historical errors from time after time on the main character and the Australian Geoffrey Rush unexpectedly delivers superb performances starring as Sellers both on and off-screen together with some of Sellers' own starring roles and its hard to fault plus some of the makeups and makeovers as Sellers' off-screen lifestyle had gradually taken its toll towards the end of his life.

cracker Not an extreme Peter Sellers fan, but appreciated his work in many movies. Actually bought the disc in a bargain bin, and it is the first movie I've ever bought that I have thrown away outright after viewing it.Unfavorable biographical portrayals certainly have their place, but when it becomes obvious in the first few minutes of a film that something is "wrong" with the way the protagonist is being portrayed, that there is unrealistic animus, and then as the film progresses, blatant, bizarrely fanciful character assassination is the result, that is reprehensible, disrespectful of the dead, and disrespectful of a great comedian.Someone had it out for Mr. Sellers when this movie was made, the only thing they could have added would be Sellers sodomizing a child or pushing a concentration camp prisoner into an oven to complete the extent the hacks who made this film went to rubbish Peter Sellers.How do I know that this movie is irredeemably negatively slanted? After all, I never knew Sellers and have not done any serious research. Sellers was a star, but not an indispensable one, not a particularly powerful nor wealthy one. No human being could behave as the film portrays and actually get work or remain married for even a month, the portrayal is that vile. A king or billionaire -might- pull it off, not Peter Sellers. If the man was as insane and evil a sociopath as this film claims, his career would have been over long before it started. The portrayal of Sellers in this movie makes "Mommy Dearest" look like Mother Teresa.I didn't think Rush did a good job. The considerable talents of Watson and Theron were completely wasted, surely Britt Eklund has more personality than was portrayed in the movie.Admittedly, entertainers have a reputation for eccentricity and being difficult to work with, some more than others. This film goes far, far over the line though. You will likely not enjoy watching this, and have been warned.

sddavis63 You want a comedian to be happy. It just goes with the territory. So it's a bit jarring to watch this bio-pic of comedian and movie star Peter Sellers. Sellers was very funny and gave life to some memorable characters (most notably, I suppose, Inspector Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove) but the portrait painted here of his personal life isn't filled with laughs at all. In fact, this film paints a picture of a troubled, emotionally immature and childish man with perhaps a bit of an Oedipus Complex (certainly dominated by his mother at the very least) who isn't able to make any other relationship (even with his own children) work successfully, and who gets overwhelmed by the characters he plays to the point at which he largely loses himself in the process. Sellers wants to break loose and set aside the disguises and become known as himself, but so successful was he with the various characters that he can't get the opportunity to do that. The film moves back and forth between fantasy and reality - and appropriately so, since that's the depiction of Sellers' own life, as he struggles to maintain a grip on reality - that struggle being shown most clearly when he imagines himself in a romance with Sophia Loren, only to have her reject him out of hand when he tries to turn his fantasy into reality. His marriages to his first wife Anne (Emily Watson) and his second wife Britt Eklund (Charlize Theron) are well portrayed, as is his troubled relationship with his children, and his working relationship with director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow.) The closing captions, which reveal that his soon to be divorced fourth wife ended up inheriting almost his entire multi-million dollar estate (because he died before the divorce was final) while his children got about $2000 US each were actually very sad.I thought this was a pretty convincing portrait. I've always thought Sellers was a good actor, although he was never at the top of my list of favourite actors. This is worth watching for those with an interest in the man's life, although it will certainly remove forever the image of a happy comedian.

James Hitchcock Many film-star biopics suffer from the drawback of being bland and excessively reverential. "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers", fortunately, is an exception, perhaps because it would be difficult to be excessively reverent about Peter Sellers, at least about Sellers the man rather than Sellers the actor. The film follows both his private life and his professional life from the 1950s, when he first came to prominence in as a comedian in the British radio programme "The Goon Show", to his death in 1980.Although he had acted in some of the best British comedies of the fifties (such as "The Ladykillers", "I'm All Right, Jack", and "The Mouse that Roared"), it was in the sixties that Sellers enjoyed his greatest international success, based largely on his ability to master a range of different accents and comic voices. Although he had major roles in Stanley Kubrick's two great films "Lolita" and "Dr Strangelove", most people today would associate his name with the Pink Panther series, in which he played the terminally incompetent French detective Inspector Clouseau. It is strange to think that Clouseau was originally only a minor character and that Sellers was only offered the part after Peter Ustinov turned it down. The original film was conceived as a vehicle for David Niven, but the sequels turned into Sellers vehicles when his performance greatly impressed director Blake Edwards.The seventies saw Sellers' career in decline; few of his films enjoyed any success, other than increasingly derivative "Pink Panther" sequels. He did, however, enjoy one final critical triumph for "Being There", based on a story by Jerzy Kosinski, which allowed him to show his skills as a dramatic as opposed to a comic actor and which earned him an Oscar nomination. This was his penultimate film and appeared a year before his death.One remark of Sellers that is given much prominence in the film was that his personality, the "real me behind the masks", had been "surgically removed". This idea may explain the importance of "Being There" for Sellers as the main character, Chance, with whom he identified, is a simpleton who is effectively a blank mask, a man who is seen by others as whatever they want him to be. Yet this idea of Sellers as a man without a personality of his own is not really borne out by the film. It might be more accurate to say that he was a man who looked at his personality, did not like what he saw, and wished that it had been surgically removed.The film shows Sellers as a childish, petulant man, much given to tantrums and emotionally over-dependent on his possessive mother Peg. He also relied heavily on the advice of a clairvoyant named Maurice Woodruff, here portrayed by Stephen Fry as something of a charlatan. He seems to have had difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality, remaining in character as Clouseau or Strangelove even when off screen. His marriage to his long-suffering first wife Anne Howe seems to have broken down when he "confessed" to an affair with Sophia Loren (his co-star in "The Millionairess") which never existed outside his imagination. His second marriage to the beautiful Swedish actress Britt Ekland seems to have been happy at first, but quickly deteriorated and ended in domestic violence. According to the film, the cause of the rupture was that she wanted children and he did not, as his relationship with the children of his first marriage was always a difficult one.Rather surprisingly, the film omits details of Sellers' two subsequent marriages, although I would have thought that his final marriage to Lynne Frederick would have provided the film-makers with plenty of material. Frederick, who was much younger than her husband, was often depicted in the media as a greedy, hypocritical gold-digger, a characterisation which might have fitted well with the film's view of Sellers as a self-deluding fantasist.The film's main strength is the performance from Geoffrey Rush in the title role. Although there is little physical resemblance between the two men, and although, at 53, Rush was considerably older than the character he was playing except for the final scenes, he is incredibly convincing. At times it almost seems as though the real Peter Sellers has been brought back to life. Although Rush is perhaps best known as the fictional pirate captain in "Pirates of the Caribbean", he seems to be at his best playing real-life individuals; he was also very good as Walsingham in the two "Elizabeth" films and brilliant as David Helfgott in "Shine". Most of the other roles are little more than cameos, but one exception is the fine contribution from Emily Watson as Anne Howe.I would not rate this film quite as highly as the deeply moving "Shine"; Peter Sellers was such a difficult, self-destructive character that, however good Rush is, one is never really moved by what happens to him. Nevertheless, this is a fine biography of a man who, whatever his faults, was at his best a very fine actor. 8/10