The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

I love Geoffrey Rush. I've seen him play everything from Leon Trotsky to Javert and he becomes a completely different person for each role that he plays. In Shakespere in Love I kept waiting for Rush to appear since I knew he'd be in the movie, and nearly totally missed that he was the dumpy little producer guy. I can't imagine anyone else doing nearly so brilliant a job playing Peter Sellers.

First of all, let's get something straight, people who enjoy Pink Panther movies have pure hearts and enjoy life more than people who think they're dumb. (Except me, I just have a sadistic enjoyment of goofy humour.) Not to mention all of his other roles, some of which were even more brilliant, like the three parts he played in Dr. Strangelove. Sellers existed before the age of “Entertainment Tonight”, before people knew more about actors’ personal lives than their own families’, so all I ever knew about Sellers were his performances.

Sellers is portrayed as that rare kind of dysfunctional human being who, by sheer luck, ends up being good at something that is lucrative enough that people will tolerate his destructive ways. It reminds me of Mick Jagger saying “I never had a drug problem, I could get drugs whenever I wanted.” So the particular pathologies that Sellers grew up without knowing how to control, thanks to an overly permissive yet simultaneously overbearing mother, are again allowed to grow freely in his adult life. Rush pulls the portrayal off in that larger-than-life way where sellers himself probably couldn't have done it better, since he may not have been self-aware enough to portray himself letting characters' traits seep into his own personality and seemingly take over.

It's really too bad this movie didn't get a theatrical release, and only ran on HBO in North America. The performance was far more of an achievement than any of the best actor Oscar-nominees. And the directing was very original, using lots of bizarre set-switching and actors breaking character. If you can find this movie you should definitely watch it, and if you were a fan of Sellers you should seek it out.
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