The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
July 2005 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Everything Bad for You Is Good, a book by Steven Johnson, is getting press these days because it makes the counter-intuitive argument that our national IQs are going up, not down. Why is that? Because television keeps getting harder. Compare Dallas to The Sopranos. So now the term "made for television" on a DVD box can be a good thing. Such is certainly the case with the DVD The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, winner of a 2005 Golden Globe. Acting, directing, script-writing, editing, audio, musical score -- name your category, this is an extraordinary film.

It’s also a labor of love -- no detail has been overlooked. Take just the award-winning opening titles, which are goofy, digitally animated cartoons of Sellers in his major roles. They name the cast and crew, as opening titles are meant to do, but also foreshadow the premise of the film, that Sellers was both a genius and a scoundrel. Says director Steven Hopkins, "It’s a film about Peter Sellers in the style of a Peter Sellers film." Every scene is crammed with throwaway references to his characters, dialogue, or sight-gags. Geoffrey Rush is brilliant in the role of Sellers, and Sellers-like, he takes on 50+ different characters, morphing into his own mother, his father, his wife, his various directors, always to justify his own bad behavior. And very bad behavior it was -- selfish, destructive, and cruel.

The supporting cast is just as superb. Emily Watson plays Sellers's first wife Anne with depth and nuance. Miriam Margolyes is both comical and poignant as his overbearing, indulgent mother. What a fine choice to put John Lithgow in as Blake Edwards, and how well the script unfolds the constant friction between Sellers and Edwards. Charlize Theron is a great Britt Ekland, Sellers’ second wife, who fulfills his fantasies of attracting beautiful, young, sexy women. With so many important supporting characters and with Geoffrey Rush himself in so many separate roles, directing this film must have been Steven Hopkins’ greatest challenge yet.

Excellent made-for-television movies like this make excellent DVDs. The audio, for example, which is full of surprises, won two awards. Peter Levy's cinematography is constantly interesting, always in flux among black-and-white footage, digital effects, rich color images, and cartoons. Sellers staged lots of home movies of his family over his lifetime, and in homage, Levy shifts from color to black and white, even in the middle of a scene, as a way of indicating Sellers’s own mental movements between fantasy and reality.

If you view this movie only once, you’ll miss a lot. The best way to see it a second time is with the commentary on. (The other four extras are predictable -- deleted scenes, cast comments, and so on.) What Geoffrey Rush and Steven Hopkins discuss, scene by scene, is the movie’s point -- that is, the paradox and the challenge of acknowledging Sellers’s egomania yet profoundly admiring him.

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