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

Mr. Nice (UK, 2010)
Directed by Bernard Rose
Starring Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny, David Thewlis, Crispin Glover

Western cinema is often accused of presenting a 'Hollywood version' of reality, glamorising the gritty and turning the important into the frivolous. While the truth of this statement varies from film to film, there are two subjects which have been unduly 'Hollywood-ised' more than any other: drugs and pornography. For every Boogie Nights, there are a dozen films like The Moguls and I Want Candy which have little or no credibility with regard to their subject matter. And for every Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, you'll get a dozen films like Mr. Nice.
Bernard Rose's take on the autobiography of drug baron Howard Marks should have made for quite an interesting film. Quite apart from his prolific career running hashish to Britain and the US, Marks was apparently approached to spy for MI6 and got himself involved in the dark dealings of the IRA. But as Marks' remarkable story plays out, you find yourself becoming slowly disconnected from what is happening, becoming frustrated by the performances and the film's opinion of this Welsh rogue.

On the good side, Mr. Nice has some interesting visual touches which set it apart from the likes of Blow and Alpha Dog. Rose has always been a strong visual artist, and in this he uses digital technology to insert the characters into stock footage of Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This practice may be relatively common, but it's done so seamlessly that you can't help wondering whether it was done digitally, or whether Rose managed to find a few lost corners of London and then shoot them on deliberately degraded stock. In an added twist, the central character remains roughly the same age throughout - we see him inhabiting his past selves in the classroom and playground, in the manner of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.There are also a number of moments in which the comedy works, the best of these being where Marks is stopped by customs and his car is taken apart to be searched. After a bit of banter with the customs officers, Marks looks around as it emerges that they won't find any hashish in the lining of his car. He makes eye contact with an elderly lady who is waved through; she tips her passport to him, and we realise where the stuff is really hiding. Scenes like this and the confusing codenames for the drugs are pleasant, knowing riffs on The French Connection and its successors.

The structure of Mr. Nice is not that of a standard biopic. It may proceed in a linear fashion, beginning with Marks winning a place at Oxford and ending up with his release from prison, but it doesn't feel like a straightforward adaptation of a memoir. Like the recent Ian Dury biopic, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, Mr. Nice is told in more of a cabaret style, a collection of anecdotes and fragments from an insanely eventful life. The film is bookended by Marks walking out on stage at an unnamed theatre to do a gig, and asking: "Are there any plain-clothed policeman in tonight?"But it is here, in this device, that the flaws with the film begin to come to the surface. Even as biopics go, Mr. Nice is massively hagiographic, relying so heavily on the charm of the central character that the second our sympathy wavers we never properly settle back into the story. Regardless of how he was in real life, the Howard Marks presented in Mr. Nice is a lovable rogue, whose involvement in drugs began almost by accident and whose career was apparently motivated by little more than wanting to provide for his loved ones.

Having the cabaret set-up gives the distinct impression that the version of events that we are seeing has been cleverly rehearsed. Like a stand-up comic perfecting his routine, Marks talks up the bits that get our sympathy, glosses over the ones that don't and always goes for a laugh over something more shocking or substantial. What we are seeing is a character, not the man himself, just as Peter Sellers would constantly slip into different characters while being interviewed. The difference is that Sellers genuinely didn't know who he was: the fact that the act was not voluntary made him emotionally compelling. Marks, meanwhile, knows full well who he is but is reluctant to tell you anything. By keeping his cards so close to his chest, he puts up a barrier between us and him, and eventually we give up trying to understand him.The film merits a very unflattering comparison with Notorious, the biopic of rapper Notorious B.I.G. (as opposed to the Alfred Hitchcock film). Both films focus on characters with some involvement in drugs, but present them as being so bizarrely innocent and unfortunate that they became little more than pantomime caricatures of 'good citizens'. The problem is not that the real life Howard Marks or Biggie Smalls weren't perhaps victims of circumstance - the problem is that the film conveys this in such a suspect way, that we start to question the credibility of their story.

The film's biggest failure, like Notorious, is that it fails to present a solid moral case, one way or the other. There are numerous lines where Marks complains that "the law is wrong" and that cannabis shouldn't be illegal. And the film doesn't entirely demonise the police as being backward, uptight, sexually-repressed fascists, who want to take the country back to the days of wartime discipline. But this viewpoint is never properly developed into a coherent case. Most of the time the film is a carefree romp full of people rolling around getting stoned and having sex; perhaps a more fitting title would have been Carry On Dealing.This light-hearted tone becomes so overbearing that it prevents the film from being dark enough when it really needs to be. The scenes of Marks hitting rock bottom in prison, getting shingles and having his teeth pulled out, are shot in the same gruesome, full-on style that worked so well on Candyman. But they feel tacked-on, like Rose had forgotten to show the downside to Marks' lifestyle and was attempting to cut his losses. Even the scene where Marks is about to be kneecapped by an IRA gunman is poorly done: it's briefly tense, but it then transpires it was all a joke, and everyone walks away laughing, except for us.The performances are also a complete mixed bag. Rhys Ifans can be a good actor - think of his performance as Peter Cook in the TV film Not Only, But Always. But his performance as Howard Marks, as a Welsh, womanising vagabond who enjoys a smoke and a drink, is not that much of a stretch. Chloe Sevigny's character is very underwritten: she spends most of her time telling Ifans to stop dealing drugs, and yet she never has the courage to leave him. On the up side, Christian McKay is very good as the MI6 operative, and Crispin Glover makes the best he can of the American stoner. But the best performance, by a mile, is David Thewlis as crazed IRA operative Jim McCann. Despite a completely unnecessary shot of his member about an hour in, he dominates the screen, spitting venom and creating havoc wherever he goes.Mr. Nice is a deeply unsatisfying account of Howard Marks' life, which has little of interest to say about either the ethics of drugs or the elaborate means of transporting them. As Bill Bailey once said, marijuana and cogent political debate do not mix; every time the film attempts to get on a pedestal and say something meaningful, it collapses into an embarrassing, giggling heap. Rose has done a decent job with the visuals, and every time David Thewlis is on screen it's worth watching. But otherwise it's a biopic with no real purpose or direction, occasionally entertaining but always underwhelming.

Rating: 2/5
Verdict: An aimless, rose-tinted failure