The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (UK/ USA, 2004)
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Starring Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, Emily Watson, John Lithgow

It was always going to be difficult to make a film about the life of Peter Sellers. The man was an immensely complicated personality who claimed to have no underlying self. His life was a Molotov cocktail of drug abuse, women and heart attacks, interspersed with some of the finest character acting ever to grace the silver screen.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is an admirable attempt to portray or depict Sellers, recreating key scenes from his film career alongside problems in his personal life. But despite the best efforts of director Stephen Hopkins and a fine performance by Geoffrey Rush, it never quite satisfies either emotionally or biographically. Whether due to the physical limits of the production or the inherent complexity of Sellers the enigma, in the end it does little more than scratch the surface.On the plus side, Peter Sellers (as it shall hence be called) does a very good job of replicating the various period settings. There are all the usual batch of camera tricks, such as using green-screen to recreate streets, and the colours of the film have been manipulated to give the appearance of degraded stock. But on top of the usual whistles and bells, the film captures a number of moments in Sellers' life with such accuracy that it could pass off as a documentary. This is particularly true of the opening section where The Goon Show is recreated on stage, with all the riotousness and anarchy of the original broadcasts.The film simply wouldn't work if we didn't believe in the performance of the lead actor, and in this respect Geoffrey Rush is ideal. Although he has the aid of an army of wigs and vast quantities of make-up, he never lets the artifice dominate his characterisation of Sellers or the various roles therein. Rush goes through the same physical transformations of Sellers, moving over the course of the film from podgy to fighting fit and finally ghostly and frail. Most of all, he mimics Sellers' vocal performances very accurately, going beyond impersonation in almost every instance.But rather than just have Sellers playing the various characters from his films, Hopkins and Rush contrive to have Sellers playing most of the people around him as well. At key moments, the camera will go 'back stage' and we watch the same characters as played by Sellers. This self-reflexive tactic is unnervingly effective, because it reaches the very core of Sellers' character: he was only happy or honest when he was being other people. Seeing Sellers as Stanley Kubrick in the taxi, we get a more open insight to Sellers than we would ever get from the horses' mouth, and seeing him re-dub the scene of his wife leaving him conveys his desperate need to be loved at any cost.The other performances manage to match Rush in terms of quality, even if they don't all get the screen time they deserve. Emily Watson is very good as Sellers' first wife Anne Hayes, who struggles with his cruel streak and his distance from their children. Watson resists the urge to overegg the emotional torment, so that we are convinced that she still loves him even when his behaviour is at its most outrageous. John Lithgow is having a ball as Blake Edwards; even if he is occasionally larger-than-life, he taps into Sellers' ability to produce hatred and admiration often simultaneously. And Miriam Margolyes is a good choice for Sellers' mother, who dominates his early life and instigates his early attempts to get into film.On top of this, the film has a number of fantasy moments which are particularly touching. The best of these is the dream sequence in Sellers' head as he is being revived from his near-fatal heart attack. We see the various characters from his film career up to that point - Clare Quilty, Dr. Strangelove, Fred Kite etc. - gathering round his hospital bed, before Sellers rises up on a huge bomb and hits a button on his heart blowing them all up. It's a moment of brief assertion from Sellers, showing his determination to be taken seriously and not be defined or controlled by the other versions of himself on screen.Unfortunately, the problems with Peter Sellers eventually outweigh all the aspects of it which are successful. First off, despite its solid production values and fantastical ambitions, it remains very televisual. Doubtless the involvement of HBO, both financially and creatively, came with the very best intentions, and had the film not been released theatrically than this would not have been a problem. But on the big screen, Peter Sellers feels too compact and limited to cut the mustard, and the backstage sequences only reinforce the feeling that the world we are seeing on screen doesn't extend very far beyond it.

Tied up with this televisual nature is the problem of content versus length. Even with two hours to play with, there is far too much in Sellers' eventful life to fit around the constraints of a feature film. But rather than opt to tell the story in small segments, as a TV miniseries or whole season of shows, Hopkins and his team are forced to cherry-pick what they deem to be the most well-known or important bits.While the film therefore serves as a good introduction to both Sellers and his body of work, those more familiar with either will get frustrated by just how much has been omitted, and by how quickly the film gallops through his life. Sellers claimed that his time on The Goon Show was the happiest time of his life, and yet we only get about five or ten minutes of it, including Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe turning up briefly in later scenes. The film never touches on his relationship with The Beatles, or much of his film work in between Dr. Strangelove and the later Pink Panthers. Most annoyingly, there is nothing in it about his last two marriages, or the precise attitude he had towards his children.Because the film moves at such a pace, we find it hard to connect with Sellers as a person. This could, of course, be argued as the intention of the film - that Sellers shifted between characters so quickly that you could never see the real him. But in order for the film to work even as an introduction, we have to have some means of connection beyond his display of talent - and there are only fleeting opportunities in which this is possible. As with Mr. Nice, Bernard Rose's biopic of Howard Marks, there is a sense of information being intentionally withheld to such an extent that our ability to empathise begins to wane.Had the film been reconfigured for a TV series, we would have got a far greater insight into both Sellers and the various characters which filtered in and out of his life. When we are introduced to Maurice Woodruff, the fraudulent fortune teller played by Stephen Fry, we expect him to get a lot of screen time because of the level of influence he quickly comes to hold. Instead he only gets three scenes and dies off-screen without a second's acknowledgement, so that we never get a proper sense of how greatly Sellers depended on him.The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is a film whose failure may not be entirely the fault of its creators. Certainly compared to Hopkins' previous offerings - Predator 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 - it is an undeniable work of genius. The problem may be the real Peter Sellers was simply too complex a man to be convincingly summarised in two short hours. In which case, the film is proof of its own failure, functioning as a workable introduction but being found wanting everywhere else.

Rating:
Verdict: Would have worked better as a TV miniseries

The Lovely Bones (USA/ New Zealand, 2009)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci

When I reviewed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, I commented on how it was possible to admire the intentions of a director while acknowledging that their film simply doesn't work. Gilliam's good intentions and body of work maintain his status as a trusted filmmaker, even if his last three films have completely missed the mark.It is much the same story with The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel which depicts a family in crisis from the viewpoint of a murdered girl. Jackson is a great filmmaker who has tackled this area before in Heavenly Creatures. He has demonstrated that he can film the un-filmable (The Lord of the Rings) and do justice to a much-loved and revered original (King Kong). And everything since The Frighteners has proved that he is skilled with CG effects, giving his films a consistent and believable physicality even in the most elaborate of circumstances.

Unfortunately, all of this goodwill towards both project and director make the reality of The Lovely Bones all the more infuriating. It is a huge misstep for Jackson, serving as ample ammunition for his critics who claimed the success of The Lord of the Rings had gone to his head and damaged his craft. In the end, like Gilliam's recent work, the film is an admirable failure, made with all the right intentions but so heavily flawed that the wound it leaves takes time to heal.On the plus side, there are two very strong performances which effectively carry the film. Saoirse Ronan is terrific as Susie Salmon, giving a really nuanced performance which progresses through a series of challenging emotional developments with complete naturalism. Ronan was 14 when filming began, and yet she delivers lines and holds her face like someone who has been acting for 20 years. Her only real rival here is Stanley Tucci, whose serial-killer-next-door is skin-crawlingly creepy. His performance combines the eeriness of Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place with the intriguing distance that he honed playing Stanley Kubrick in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.The first also has a number of scary scenes which are initially well-handled and effective at shocking an audience. The best of these is the nightmarish sequence where Susie walks around the bathroom with her killer lying in the bath and blood stained on the sink. The walls are the same shimmering, intrusive white as in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and the stillness of that scene goes some way in suggesting what kind of brutal acts have been committed. As Tucci slowly rises from the bath and takes the flannel off his face, there's not much you can do to stop gripping your seat in a desperate bid not to scream.

But the effectiveness of this sequence hints at the first big problem with The Lovely Bones. There are huge, unmanageable lurches in tone between the tough, melancholic scenes surrounding Susie's death and the attempts at cheery sentimentality in between. Like so many of Steven Spielberg's 'serious' films, what starts off as dark, interesting and downbeat is quickly compromised by various decisions which undermine or eliminate the film's emotional impact.Susan Sarandon's character of the cantankerous alcoholic grandmother is a totally unnecessary attempt to bring quirkiness and eccentricity to the situation. What we want to see in the scenes not set in the afterlife are of a family struggling to stay together in the midst of total despair - kind of like Ordinary People, only good. But instead Jackson opts for goofiness over hard work, giving us a montage of Grandma playing in foam and setting things on fire, and thereby losing sight of the emotional thread.

A bigger problem lies in Jackson's decision about depicting heaven or the afterlife. Some films only hint at the afterlife, letting the imaginative power of the audience do the leg-work. Think of the ending of Faraway, So Close!, Laura's angel in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, or the Grey Havens in Jackson's The Return of the King. Other efforts depict heaven as somewhere universally recognisable but with a subtle twist, such as the busy black-and-white offices in A Matter of Life and Death, or the hospital-cum-railway station in The Exorcist III. In these films the familiarity of heaven is immediately comforting, but it feels different enough for it to not just be a different part of Earth.Instead, Jackson opts for a computer-generated 'in-between', coating Susie's entire world in bucket-loads of digital animation which owe a great debt to Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come. Jackson knows how to make special effects work, and in The Lord of the Rings every CG effect feels seamless and physical, or at least bound by the same physical rules. But the difficulty in depicting the afterlife is that such a place does not have to play by the same rules - we can have landscapes which defy gravity or roses flowering under frozen lakes. The result of this difference is that no matter how seamless or well-rendered the visuals are, it does feel like Jackson is making it up as he goes along, until eventually his whole rendering of 'heaven' looks and feels like a Day-Glo video game.This wouldn't be so bad if the film established a convincing link between what happens in the real world and what happens in the 'in-between'. But Susie's world always feels disconnected from what happens to her family, and the film keeps changing its mind about where and when reality intervenes. When Mark Wahlberg smashes all his ships-in-bottles, that is carried over, but when the gazebo collapses there's no clear reason for it. Because Susie cannot influence her 'heaven' in any consistent or significant way, the version of 'heaven' on screen stops being her own perfect world and becomes neither more nor less than lazy symbolic shorthand.Even more troubling than the visuals is the film's emotional heart. Films surrounding death and family disintegration are among the most manipulative when done badly, and The Lovely Bones continues this trend, serving up a brace of very uncomfortable moral messages which play out in a deeply insensitive manner.

Its first message is that death, or being murdered, can actually make a person happier. Although Susie is initially and understandably horrified by what has happened to her, she seems to get over it surprisingly quickly and only returns to the pain of her family towards the end. There have been a number of film which have handled the passage from life to death or explored death as a means to escape pain - think of Shadowlands or the ending of Return of the King. The Lovely Bones takes a potentially interesting concept and is so heavy-handed and preachy that it makes Ward's work look subtle.The other, arguably worse message surrounds vengeance from beyond the grave. This is a staple of ghost and horror stories, and so you would again expect Jackson to do a half-decent job. But whether by bad judgement or the content of the book, what should be a story about forgiveness and catharsis becomes a film about revenge, hatred and judgement from on high. The prospect of Susie's family healing and moving on is only hinted at in the epilogue, while most of the film strives to make us wish death upon Tucci's character. His eventual comeuppance, involving the recurring image of an icicle, smacks of the kind of moral duplicity which long seemed to have died out with Cecil B. De Mille.In spite of its massive failings, The Lovely Bones remains an admirable effort for Jackson. It may well be that the book is genuinely un-filmable, and that in years to come this effort will be held up as proof. As it is, the film doesn't work on any level, as a spiritual paean, a family drama or a straightforward whodunit, and it is easily Jackson's weakest film since Meet the Feebles. But in the midst of disaster, there are individual moments and performances which suggest that this is merely a very obvious false note, rather than the death knell of an entire career.

Rating: 1.5/5
Verdict: An admirable but blatant failure

The Party (USA, 1968)
Directed by Blake Edwards
Starring Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Denny Miller, Steve Franken

During the filming of A Shot in the Dark, the friendship between Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers steadily deteriorated. In between The Pink Panther and its sequel, Sellers had been Oscar-nominated for his work in Dr. Strangelove, finding Stanley Kubrick a more rewarding director with whom to work. Within days of the shoot ending, Sellers left Hollywood and vowed never to work with Edwards again. It would take something very unusual to bring this now-legendary partnership back together.It is tempting to dismiss The Party as a Pink Panther film without the heist, since its central character and particular style of bawdy slapstick is very close to the antics of Inspector Clouseau. It hasn’t dated as well as Dr. Strangelove, nor is it as cohesive as A Shot in the Dark. But The Party still has a lot in its favour, resulting in a breezy and inventive comedy which is very light on its feet.

From a technical point of view, The Party is distinctive because of the manner in which it was created, and the resulting innovations which were necessary to make it fit together. Edwards’ original screenplay was some 63 pages long, less than half the length of a standard film. He did this to allow the cast to improvise to a greater extent than had been previously allowed, something which doubtlessly tempted Sellers back to the fold. They weren’t exactly making everything up as they went along, but characters who started off as walk-ons ending up as strong supporting roles.Because so much of the film is improvised, Edwards needed to shoot the film in order, from multiple angles, and review the footage almost instantaneously – otherwise there would be no continuity and great bits of improv would be lost. Under normal circumstances this would be impossible; celluloid has to be developed overnight to be shown in the rushes the following day.

To get around this, Edwards’ producers mounted a video camera onto the side of the film camera, so that a scene would be captured simultaneously on film and on tape. The tape could then be played back via monitors within five minutes of the word ‘cut!’. This innovation, which is now common practice, saved the production a fortune on reshoots and allowed the actors to improvise more freely, safe in the knowledge than not all their extra lines would end up on the cutting room floor.The film contains all that is good and bad about Blake Edwards. He is a director who knows how to do physical slapstick and make one joke lead into another, rather than simply serving up a series of set-pieces. The film has a real sense of flow, with one embarrassing moment moving seamlessly to another, and all the while the farcical atmosphere is escalating. The small setting of one house (purpose-built for the film) not only creates a natural tension, but means that there is very little need to resort to lengthy camera tricks for the more elaborate stunts. Sellers’ chicken may clearly be on a wire when it flies off his plate, but all the falls into the foam and pool are for real.As well as sustaining momentum, the film utilises a number of great running jokes, both visual and verbal, to keep us entertained. Visually we have Wyoming Bill’s crushing handshakes and the infamous drunken waiter; his tussles with the head waiter and constant swigging of anything alcoholic are very well-played, and he becomes one of the most endearing characters in the film. Most of the verbal running gags come from Sellers, as we would expect: his delivery of “howdy part-en-er!” and “birdy num-num” becomes an integral part of his character.

This latter part, however, also hints at the downside of Edwards’ particular style of writing and directing. Although the humour is sustained more or less throughout, the characterisation is pretty thin. We follow Sellers and Claudine Longet throughout, and they do seem genuinely likeable and three-dimensional. But with a couple of other exceptions, the other characters seem to float in and out as the film sees fit. We would like to spend more time with Wyoming Bill or the drunken women with the Martini glass, and find out what happens to them. But the scale and attention span of the film makes them much more incidental. While that may reflect the feeling of being at a party, it is not very rewarding beyond this experience.Both Blake Edwards and Mel Brooks were huge silent film fans whom at one point in their careers used their reputation to effectively make a modern silent film. Both The Party and Silent Movie mimic beautifully the style of comedy associated with Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati. You can watch the dinner scene in The Party with the sound off, and it is still every bit as funny. The difference, however, is that Brooks is able to create characters than seem to exist beyond the boundaries of his affectionate parody. In The Party, the jokes are funny, but you don’t identify as strongly with the characters in the brief gaps in-between.

There has been a great debate about white actors ‘blacking up’ to play non-white roles. This issue flared up as recently as 2007, when Canadian poet Orville Lloyd Douglas criticised the casting of white actress Angelina Jolie as the multi-racial Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart. The debate surrounding blackface (and indeed its derivatives) is much more complex than it would first appear.If one makes the blanket assumption that all blacking up is racist, than we neglect the possibility of films using this device and its image to send up racism: think of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled or Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Tropic Thunder. The temptation is to go the other way and see blackface as a product of its time, and therefore acceptable within the context of the film. Seems fine, but by that logic The Birth of a Nation is all well and good because it pre-dates the civil rights moment. Even with the racism taken out of it, D. W. Griffith’s film is still hagiographic to the point of being insulting.

A good compromise would be that, in a comedy like this, the device is okay so long as the comedy does not rely on it; in other words, the bulk of humour should not derive from belittling the Hindu character or making fun of his race. The Party is not a film about exposing the prejudices of the rich; they certainly have no problem with a Hindu being present at a party of otherwise white men and women, any more than they have a problem with hiring Russian dancers. For the most part the film avoids the trap of The Millionairess and does not solely rely on Sellers’ accent to provide the laughs.Because so much of Tati-esque comedy is about escalation, The Party does become ridiculous as it heads into the last ten minutes. The introduction of a baby elephant into the house, which then floods and fills with foam, is every bit as over-the-top as the ending of The Pink Panther Strikes Again, with the disappearing castle and Cato’s attack in the collapsing bedroom. Although the film was made in the year of the May rising in France, any suggestion that the film has a hippie undercurrent should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Both this sequence and Longet’s dreary song are only superficially political, and are in the context of a film more interested in creating anarchy than bringing people together to solve it.
The Party is not the finest hour of either Sellers or Edwards, being neither as fluid as A Shot in the Dark nor having the acerbic bite of Dr. Strangelove or The Magic Christian. But it is more than just an incidental collaboration, containing bona fide examples of both parties’ technical skill and charismatic way of working. It’s a breezy ninety minute romp which never overstays its welcome and generally overcomes its flaws. Certainly when it comes to 1960s comedies, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

Rating: 3.5/5
Verdict: Breezy, flimsy fun