One of my all time favorites.

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Masterpiece!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

BBC Radio personality and family man in 1950s London longs to be a film actor, but can't get his foot in the door (he's not handsome enough); he parlays his talent for disguise into landing his first role, and is soon headlining in British comedies before Hollywood comes calling. BBC Films and HBO could not have picked a better actor to play extraordinarily popular and talented film star Peter Sellers than Geoffrey Rush, who is uncanny in the role. Rush, who also breaks the fourth wall--in disguise as loved ones, as it should be--in delineating the affect Peter had on his family, shows us the insecurities of the man who was most likely afraid he had reached the limits of his talent. He was loyal to the wife and children he left behind when fame consumed him, yet his frightening bursts of temper continually dogged him before and after a major heart attack in the mid-1960s. Rush cannot do much but resurrect our movie-memories when he's playing Sellers as one of his film characters in "The Pink Panther" or "Dr. Strangelove", but he captures the private highs and lows of the man with aplomb. The movie, despite so much material to work from, loses its footing in its final stages, rushing the narrative along to a dull conclusion. Of the supporting performances, Charlize Theron is a terrific Britt Ekland (Sellers' second wife), but John Lithgow as Blake Edwards and Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick come up short. A hit-and-miss biography, though very well-produced and worth-seeing for the star-turn.

An amazing triumph for Rush in the title role and he deserves every accolade for his work in this film. While his is the flashy role that grabs our attention, it is Emily Watson as his wife that anchors this picture and her performance is stunning. It was, in fact, at Rush's insistence that Watson agreed to accept the crucial part she plays and that demonstrates well the high regard in which she is held by others in the profession. She is universally recognized as the finest actor of our time and there is no disputing that. Here, as usual, Ms. Watson takes what could be a supporting role and turns it into a towering pillar of powerhouse proportions. The subtleness of expression, the incredible use of those eyes, and the raw emotion of her scenes simply overwhelms the viewer. The heartbreak she displays is so real that it moves one to tears and we share in her pain intimately. No other actor has the ability to draw an audience into a character in such a manner and Watson is truly the most uniquely gifted artist working in any medium today. Enjoy Rush's work as Sellars but revel in the incomparable talent of Emily Watson as she gives another unforgettable performance that will touch your very soul.

How good was Peter Sellers? When I was an adolescent I saw a commercial for the upcoming showing of "A Shot in the Dark" (curiously, the best of the Pink Panther movies). It showed clips of Elke Sommer running around "nude" (what passed for "nude" in them days. I tuned in for Elke Sommer and quickly became obsessed with the weird character of Inspector Clouseau as limned by Peter Sellers.I became a Sellers nut, watching all his movies, collecting "Goon Show" tapes as they came on the market. But I wondered, who was this man, who had so inhabit these bizarre characters? So when THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS came out I devoured it from cover to cover.The biography THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS was a peculiar book that drew a shocking conclusion: that Peter Sellers was evil. Fortunately, Sellers is not portrayed as evil in the movie. But it does seem that Sellers, who yearned to be a leading-man type, was not the leading man even in his own life. He was a character role.The movie is hardly for Sellers neophytes. Anyone unfamiliar with Sellers' films or characters -- particularly in his early British classics like "The Ladykillers" or "Carlton-Browne of the F.O."-- might be confused by the images this flick focuses on. Yet anyone more intimately familiar with Sellers life and films might be put off by the whole.The movie starts at a point the real Sellers (probably peering over his shoulder through a fog of nostalgia) thought of as his happiest time, making the BBC-radio "Goon Show" (still repeated, still one of the funniest shows on the air). It ends with a remake (and an added bit of symbolism) of his last scene of the movie "Being There." Sandwiched in between are snippets of Sellers' selfishness and the unpleasantness he imposed on others.Whether the book or the film capture the real Sellers will never be known. Sellers famous said there was no real him -- on his "Muppet Show" appearance he said he had his "me" surgically removed. This is arrant nonsense. Sellers was all about himself. He lived a selfish life and died without being surrounded by friends and family. Apparently there was a "real" Sellers but he never acknowledged it because that person was not very nice (hilariously yet poignantly summed in this film by Sellers assuring his little daughter he still loved her, "Just not as much as I love Sophia Loren" (Loren to this day admits to an affair and I think, like the book and movie has it, it was "all in the mind."The most important question for this movie is, how does Geoffrey Rush come across as Sellers? In some scenes, Rush bears an almost frightening resemblance to pictures of the real Sellers. And he is uncannily able to recreate some of Sellers' film performances. Personally, I would like to have seen more time spent on Sellers' films (particularly "Casino Royale," which the book claims Sellers destroyed, and which ultimately, in a nice bit of karma, almost destroyed Sellers' career).In the end, however, while a brilliant actor like Rush may imitate Sellers' creations to an alarming degree, and while Rush is himself hilarious in some of his own parts, he cannot duplicate the comedic genius that was Sellers on film. He can look eerily like Sellers but he's never particularly funny in Sellers' roles.Sellers might well have been the miserable git described in the book and the movie, though I think both book and movie are at fault for psychoanalyzing a dead person. That doesn't mean they are wrong (though original "Goon" Michael Bentine says a lot that has been said about Sellers is nonsense, while former wife and bombshell Britt Eckland says the movie doesn't go far enough! Take your pick.) Though Sellers disingenuously protested his own lack of a genuine persona, and though a person is not merely a series of syndromes that can be so blithely deconstructed, Sellers might well be the epitome of the old joke about television: that it brings into your living room people you wouldn't have in your house.What made Sellers was not so much his ability to "inhabit" his characters as to make them,when he was at his best, incredibly funny. And in this, Rush, and the movie fails. Like Sellers, Rush beautifully "inhabits" his characters. But in this movie his character is the real Sellers, the man who was able to make miserable everyone he came into contact with personally. Rush is unable to go the next step and show how Sellers was able to take a little makeup and maybe a mustache and bring joy to millions who -- fortunately -- would never get to meet him personally.But as for a surfer version of Sellers' life, the movie is probably as good as it will ever get as far as bio-pics. Instead of giving actual "Goon" scrips they show anarchy on the "Goon" stage. Instead of showing Sellers' actual proposal to Britt, they have Ray Ellington's son singing "You Make Me Fell So Young" in a wacky and (dare I say?) "Goonish" sequence. Sellers in the movie doesn't come off as half as destructive as (if hearsay is to be believed) he actually was; but it also fails to show why he was loved--because when he was on screen in his best roles (which curiously end about the time of "The Pink Panther") he was the best slapstick artist since the silent era and incredibly funny.Also bad: Nigel Havers has a bit part as David Niven, with nearly nothing to do! Apparently Havers has the rights to one of Nivens' memoirs. Let us hope he is allowed to do it. What a waste of a perfectly good actor.

Biographical movies are always an interesting combination of reality and fiction. You can't tell the story with absolute truth, so you do your best to give the flavour. And here the idea is to give the flavour of the mass of insecurities and contradictions that was Peter Sellers.Let me say that the film is a very clever movie - well structured, well written, and imaginatively designed and directed in an alluring combination of historical reconstruction and surreal meta-reality.And then let me go on to say that Geoffrey Rush is absolutely superb (not that the rest of the cast isn't, but Rush does stand out). He is Peter Sellers. And his performance is so good that you will be astonished, as I still am, at how much a man who looks nothing like Peter Sellers looks so much like him - I think it is all in the performance.Brilliant.