I'll admit off the bat to being a Peter Sellers fan. Not a foaming at the mouth, rabid fanatic, but I've always liked his work - so perhaps there is some bias in my judgment of this film. I'd like to hope there's not too much, though.
The first impression I got, early on, was that for reasons unknown to me, the movie set itself out to be a character assassination of Sellers, and nothing that happened later did anything to change this opinion.
Even if you don't share that view, as most people seem not to, I would suggest to you that the movie is deeply flawed for a couple of very basic reasons. Firstly there is nothing better than a flawed character: I'm all for them, even if they were real people. The thing is that you have to develop the character and show us WHY he or she is flawed. 'Life and Death of PS' barely even attempts to explain why Sellers behaves the way he does. Skipping his early life entirely, and commencing basically just before his film career (we see a brief scene of The Goon Show at the start), the movie offers no explanation for Sellers' narcissism, callousness, womanizing, other than the quite unconvincing and endlessly repeated theme that he had a pushy, over-indulgent mother. And even if we accepted that this somehow led to his personality traits, we would have to take the writers' word for it, because there is no substantial causal link established. Sellers behaves like a demented prat virtually from the start. We never get to see how he got to be that way.
The second major flaw is implicit in two central premises of the movie: that Sellers was a deeply flawed personality, and that he actually had no personality. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that a man with no character of his own can't have character flaws.
Finally there are times in this movie when the portrayal of Sellers is simply too absurd to be believable. How on earth somebody with such manifest comic genius, and who could be seemingly irresistibly charming at times (something which requires a certain amount of insight) - how such a person could behave at other times with complete and utter cluelessness about what people around him were thinking beggars belief. You would basically have to accept that the man was periodically out of his mind, yet the movie doesn't really seem to posit anything like mental derangement.
The only reason I can really think of for watching this movie is to see Geoffrey Rush expressing his own versatility as an actor, by tackling so many of Sellers' character roles. Despite an impressive performance, he is still so conspicuously inferior to Sellers himself though, that you might as well just go and rent the original Sellers movies.
I couldn't help feeling that this was a rather nasty little film, apart from a not particularly good one.
The first impression I got, early on, was that for reasons unknown to me, the movie set itself out to be a character assassination of Sellers, and nothing that happened later did anything to change this opinion.
Even if you don't share that view, as most people seem not to, I would suggest to you that the movie is deeply flawed for a couple of very basic reasons. Firstly there is nothing better than a flawed character: I'm all for them, even if they were real people. The thing is that you have to develop the character and show us WHY he or she is flawed. 'Life and Death of PS' barely even attempts to explain why Sellers behaves the way he does. Skipping his early life entirely, and commencing basically just before his film career (we see a brief scene of The Goon Show at the start), the movie offers no explanation for Sellers' narcissism, callousness, womanizing, other than the quite unconvincing and endlessly repeated theme that he had a pushy, over-indulgent mother. And even if we accepted that this somehow led to his personality traits, we would have to take the writers' word for it, because there is no substantial causal link established. Sellers behaves like a demented prat virtually from the start. We never get to see how he got to be that way.
The second major flaw is implicit in two central premises of the movie: that Sellers was a deeply flawed personality, and that he actually had no personality. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that a man with no character of his own can't have character flaws.
Finally there are times in this movie when the portrayal of Sellers is simply too absurd to be believable. How on earth somebody with such manifest comic genius, and who could be seemingly irresistibly charming at times (something which requires a certain amount of insight) - how such a person could behave at other times with complete and utter cluelessness about what people around him were thinking beggars belief. You would basically have to accept that the man was periodically out of his mind, yet the movie doesn't really seem to posit anything like mental derangement.
The only reason I can really think of for watching this movie is to see Geoffrey Rush expressing his own versatility as an actor, by tackling so many of Sellers' character roles. Despite an impressive performance, he is still so conspicuously inferior to Sellers himself though, that you might as well just go and rent the original Sellers movies.
I couldn't help feeling that this was a rather nasty little film, apart from a not particularly good one.