THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS
Movie (2004), 122 min
Director: Stephen Hopkins


“Does your deug (dog) bite?” That was Inspector Clouseau’s question to a hotel clerk, pronounced in Peter Sellers’s classically silly could-be-French accent. As “The Pink Panther” rolled on, I laughed as Clouseau was told no, the dog didn’t bite, whereupon the dog bit him. “But you said your deug does not bite.” And the clerk says, “But that is not my dog.” I’m not sure I have the quotations right, but the exchange goes something like that.

That is the silly Sellers I remember, engaging in typical British slapstick scenes with deadpan delivery and sudden shrugs of thwarted surprise. Sad to say, the Sellers in “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,” supposedly the “real” person, is not very funny at all.

Sellers is played by Geoffrey Rush, who does a fantastic job of picking up Sellers’s cadences and vocalisms. He’s also great with the frantic rages and volatilities that make this movie hard to watch. But nothing is very enjoyable here. Sellers seems to have disappointed, enraged, or hurt just about every person we see: Blake Edwards (John Lithgow in a wig, I read), Stanley Kubrick (Stanley Tucci), first wife Emily Watson (Anne Sellers), and second wife Britt Eckland (Charlize Theron). All the angst plays against bits of charm and generosity. As a person Sellers is hard to figure.

We never see sources for Sellers’s volatility. Where did something go so wrong for him that he could treat so many people with so much cruelty and so little regret? He is said to have grown up in the theater circuit, where I suppose there was little stability, and is shown in the movie to have a twisted relationship with his mother, but nothing gives a clue to the origins of his lack of confidence. The one scene where he thinks Sofia Loren wants an affair with him does hint at delusions and at the wild, off-center reality he must have created for himself.

Though I can’t say I enjoyed this movie, I did like the run-through of Sellers’s career, from early radio days all the way to “Being There,” where the story ends. The Sellers movies were part of the stuff of my early adult life and it was fun to try to remember where I saw each of them and what I thought at the time.

Note that the cinematography is stunning, and the sound track is full of songs that evoke the years through which Sellers lived and performed. If you’re in or near the twilight years, you’ll see and hear a lot of your cultural history on the screen. That's worth a video rental, no?