The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

“A useless, talentless, empty man…” Peter Sellers (an excellent Geoffrey Rush) says of himself in this hatchet-job biopic that is at pains to step out of the standard representational biographic mode in a series of disconcerting straights-to-camera monologues by the man impersonating his own portfolio of characters and sundry personae. Probably not a bad starting point for a movie about someone who, as critics couldn’t fail to point out is quoted as saying “There used to be a me behind the mask but I had it surgically removed.” Director Stephen Hopkins sensibly deconstructs the surgical removals and replaces them with the dark side of a comic genius.  Good, Dr. Strangelove, Inspector Clouseau are just some of the great comic roles created by Sellers who, the movie (based on Roger Lewis’s controversial biography) would have us believe, in life was grotesquely egotistical and given to disturbing tantrums and violence. Perhaps what lay behind the mask was better left undisturbed?