The Year 2004: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Stephen Hopkins)

Counting Down The Zeroes welcomes back Joel (MovieMan0283) creator of the quite brilliant and eponymous The Dancing Image, which in the past month has just celebrated it's one year anniversary. For the year 2004, Joel is taking on the HBO produced 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers', screened in competition at Cannes and winner of the 'Best Motion Picture made for Television' at the Golden Globes.

The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Zeroes

(This review discusses spoilers, including the fact that Peter Sellers dies.)

A man stands alone in the lightly falling snow, his eyes wide open, his body immobile. Inside a Swiss chateau, another man looks out the window, sees his friend half-hidden in the flurry. The man in the chateau walks outside, speechless with astonishment, and circles the man in the snow, frozen as an ice sculpture (though he betrays his humanity, and a complicity with us, in one brief moment: shifting his eyes back and forth while the other man walks behind him and is out of view). Finally the circling man (who is dressed in designer ski gear replete with dark shades, the apparel of a rich tourist) just shakes his head in disbelief. The man in the snow – clad in a drab overcoat and fedora – still has not moved an inch or acknowledged the other man’s presence (except for that brief, and unseen eye-shift). So the well-dressed man finally does the only thing he can think to do: he kisses the snow man on the forehead and walks back inside.

The tourist is Hollywood director Blake Edwards (John Lithgow). The man in the snow is Peter Sellers (Geoffrey Rush). This is the closest the film comes to showing us the death which its title promises; as Edwards returns to the chateau the camera swoops up, leaving Sellers stationary in the snow, and over softly poignant music, a tasteful text rolls over the image. It informs us that Sellers died soon after, that he left a fortune to his fourth wife (whom he had intended to divorce and disinherit), and that the only affect in his wallet at the time of death was a photo of his first wife. Then we fade to black and the credits begin to roll. But just after the cast list scrolls out of view, we pull back and the image becomes flattened, as if observed on a monitor.

And indeed, it is on a monitor, watched by a man sitting in a canvas-backed chair, with his name emblazoned across its back. The name, along with the man? “Peter Sellers.” Sellers is not dressed in out-of-this-world-and-historical-moment trenchcoat and fedora, but a snazzy suit, his trademark black frames capping a self-satisfied, utterly at-ease visage. He turns towards the camera, shakes his head and sighs, speechless. The movie was good; he enjoyed it, and there’s not much more to say. So he stands up and walks off as the soundtrack blasts the Kinks’ “Well Respected Man." In mere moments, with a few deft maneuvers, the tone has become arch, comical, playful. Sellers strolls smugly across a movie set, exits onto the street outside and yanks open his trailer door. As he starts to ascend the steps, his movement is arrested by a sudden turn as he sees “us” behind him and holds up his hand, shaking his head once again. “Can’t come in here,” he informs us benevolently, but condescendingly. Then he shuts the door in our face, and there’s that name again, etched onto the trailer door. Roll credits, for real this time.

This ending tells us everything we need to know about the movie, namely that perhaps we should not take it too seriously. The film is a mixture of the satirical, the sincere (though we can never be sure how sincere), and the sociopathic. In this it certainly reflects its subject, the notoriously prickly yet brilliant British comedian who could swing from belligerent tirades to goofy pratfalls to inscrutable eccentricity with astonishing ease. I can’t speak for the veracity of all its anecdotes, but the film works on multiple levels, among which the biographical is only one.

Indeed, the movie is best taken as a subversive artifact of the Zeroes, a decade in which styles and surfaces ascended to unforeseen stages of development and self-consciousness, all while suspicions lingered that there wasn’t much “there” there. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is subversive on several levels: firstly, its hard-to-read protagonist makes hash of the usual biopic conventions (is he selfish, mentally ill, is it all an act, is he suffering inside, or is he just spoiled rotten?). One certainly can’t sympathize with Sellers and yet at times his brash, carefree narcissism can be refreshing; it’s what we secretly look for in our movie heroes, even when we demand they get their moral comeuppance (which, by the way, Sellers does, many times over). It’s hard for the screenplay to rationalize his erratic behavior with the usual biographical contrivances, though a bit too much Freudian credence is given to the overbearing Mum (Miriam Margolyes), whom Sellers calls “Peg” throughout, even as they're cuddling in bed - after his first wife leaves him, natch. (If the theory is a bit pat, it does help matters that mommy dearest is a humorously nasty piece of work herself. As her son suffers a massive heart attack, she solemnly watches the television coverage before flipping to the same news on another station and remarking with a satisfied smirk, “Both channels.”)

More obviously but perhaps also more ambitiously, the film subverts a conventional narrative approach, which is especially entrenched in the hidebound biopic genre. That said, the first phase of Sellers’ career, from lovable Goon Show loon to British Academy Award-winning actor, is presented in standard-issue clichés. There’s the snippet of the radio act (which is not especially funny in rapidly cut and shot glimpses), a bit of background (changing diapers in a London flat) and motivation (Peg tells him to bite the hands that feed him so that those above him will admire the sharpness of his teeth), failure quickly overcome with ingenious success (turned down for an audition, Sellers returns disguised as an old man and gets the part), and of course the montage to quickly inform us of all we’re missing (Sellers plays a ukulele over not-very-convincing black-and-white “home movie” footage). So far, so familiar.


But then, watching Sellers’ award reception on the tube with his parents, we get a surprise. The quiet father, constantly berated by his wife, turns to the camera and begins to address the viewer. What’s more, the actor playing the elder Sellers is no longer Peter Vaughan, but Geoffrey Rush himself, or rather Peter Sellers putting himself into the “old man’s shoes.” What he tells us is not so important – banal bromides about how Peg spoiled the boy - he always had to have the last cookie “even if it was on someone else’s plate” (cue the Sophia Loren plotline, in which Sellers convinces himself that she wants to have an affair with him - she doesn't, and he settles for her stand-in, though he's already broken up his marriage in anticipation). No, what’s most important is that the old man is Peter Sellers in makeup, that he is talking directly to the camera, and that he walks out of his cozy little room onto a movie set, where crewmembers bustle about. In other words, it’s the Brechtian gesture of the thing.

The device will be resumed throughout the film, often when we least expect it. At one point, Sellers shows up as his wife (played normally by Emily Watson, who does bemused wonders with the usually thankless type of role). The character asks to re-record Mrs. Sellers' “dialogue” – in an ADR studio, he/she then dubs a romantic rapprochement over the fed-up breakup that actually occurred. Later, in drag again as his mother, he gets up off the hospital bed and walks through several flats into a funeral home. Celebrating her son’s insensitivity for ignoring her deathbed pleas (“My boy’s a star”), Peter-as-Peg climbs into her coffin and we return to “reality” where a devastated Peter kisses the cold corpse’s lips. Commentary on the DVD informs us that these monologues were intended to show Sellers’ often self-serving conception of how other saw and perhaps justified his actions. However, they also show his immense narcissism, the way he sees other people in his life merely as different versions of himself.


Indeed, the opening credits, to the tune of Tom Jones’ “What’s New, Pussycat?” display a bevy of animated Peters – some old, some young, some male, some female (some even animal), yet all with the subtly hooked nose and thick black glasses. Before that, in a bookending device which will be echoed in the aforementioned conclusion, we see Peter Sellers enter a dark soundstage, bow before offscreen (imaginary?) applause and turn on the monitor, on which the rest of the film unfolds.The movie is full of such winking, fleet-footed gestures: after the fairly conventional “early years” (appropriate for the early Sellers’ self-effacing normality, not to mention pre-Swingin' Britain's postwar blues), the comedian’s life is shown as a Felliniesque carnival, full of fantasies, movie tributes, and virtual non sequitur effects, such as when our hero visits a car dealership and the various vehicles are transformed into purring sex kittens. When Sellers spots future wife (played by a charming if goofy-accented Charlize Theron) Britt Eklund’s name in a newspaper, the letters “B” and “E” pop out in animated throbs. (This is actually payoff to a gag involving Sellers' greedy psychic, played with corrupt impeccability by Stephen Fry). When the couple cavort on their first romantic excursion, they skip through ridiculously soft-focus fields in over-the-top slo-mo and fast-motion, all skillfully executed with sharp editing and expert music selection. The late sixties are presented as a cartoonish haze of pot smoke, animated butterflies, yellow subma - er, spacecrafts, and even a garishly made-up Peg-cum-human light show, doused in psychedelic front-projection. Later, when Sellers grows frustrated with his self-serving and drug-indulging lifestyle, he embraces silence and comes to embody the inner peace of Chance the Gardener from Being There. But this new-found austerity - this too is but a gimmick. Life & Death's loyalty is to style first and foremost, so traditional notions of suspended belief are thrown out the window. Thus freed, the movie projects a funhouse of film pastiches (The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Being There itself), trendy devices, hip music montages, and clever trickery.

In other words, the film moves; the editing is deft, the transitions effective if a bit trite, and flourishes goose the movie through set piece after set piece. And if it sometimes seems glib, well, that’s largely the point - not only because it echoes Sellers' own short-sighted self-centeredness. Which brings us to the movie’s third, probably unintentional, and yet most intriguing, subversion: Life & Death's narcissistic, shallow, skilled, and self-indulgent hero not only suits the style of the film, but also the dominant aesthetic of our very own decade. No other epoch has ever been as stylistically sophisticated as the Zeroes on all levels– moving light years beyond the cheesy 80s and drab 90s, movies, television, and advertisements shook off all traces of the functional and fused self-consciousness, playfulness, and technological sophistication, bringing design into the twenty-first century with a vengeance. The Life & Death of Peter Sellers represents all these trends: not only did it appear on HBO (the “happening” place to be in this past decade) and not only does it hearken back to the 60s (whose Pop consciousness, shaggy hair, and mid-decade musical and fashion tastes made a comeback in the 00s). The film is also saturated in the style-first, breezy fluidity that characterized Zeroes media. Thus we have a perfect fitting not only of subject and form, but also of zeitgeist.

True, seen from today’s vantage point, the film’s flourishes are no longer quite as effective. The CGI seems overdone, rendering many backgrounds quite cheesy, the bright lighting is too bright and lends the film’s look an unrefined pallor, and as television commercials, TV shows, and films have followed pace and completely consumed the video-age magic tricks which in Life & Death were at least nominally cutting-edge, the movie’s style does not impress the way it did just a few years ago. This is a pity, since the movie's subversive power lies in part on its very fluidity and assuredness. Still, what remains is the film’s unabashed chutzpah in foregrounding its narcissism and shallowness. Latter-day pop culture may have outstripped Life & Death’s surface dazzle, but there is an unacknowledged unease in ever-more-sophisticated media aesthetics. The facility of the technical mastery, coupled with a desire for fantasy and devotion to lifestyles and fashions of the urban rich, breeds a smug vapidity and soullessness in the cultural trendsetters. It becomes harder and harder to recognize the vast possibilities of art and, yes, entertainment, when the surface sheen hardens into a lacquer.

Which is to say, in less cryptic terms, that all ships are sailing towards the idea of how things are presented, rather than what is presented. [On the blog Little Worlds, we have been discussing these trends in relation to Julie & Julia with, I’m afraid, a bit more precision. Let me quote myself to get the point across: “I don't have a problem with escapist fantasies - just wish they could be told with a more realistic texture, instead of this flat ad-aesthetic look (fast cuts, close lens, surface-flashy but bottom-line-generic set design). But of course that would probably subvert the escapist element too much. Still, someone like Spielberg used to be able to situate fantasies in a real world setting - think of all the throwaway domestic details and humorous conversations in E.T. and Close Encounters. I think it could still be done, if mainstream filmmaking wasn't so intellectually lazy (and it's also tiresome how all adults are shown to have the emotional and intellectual maturity of high school students, but that's another point).”]

The triumph of The Life & Death of Peter Sellers is that it recognizes its own dead soul, indeed takes it as its subject, and does not let itself off the hook. One of the most noticeable “indie” trends of the decade (simultaneous with “indie” ceasing to mean actually “independent,” but rather a collection of pre-packaged quirky signifiers) is a move towards earnestness. The dominant tone of the decade has been arch irony, but it’s been guilty irony, as if the ghosts of 9/11 and Iraq were peering out of the rubble to challenge our superficiality. Yet the over-compensating New Sincerity (to borrow one of Erich Kuersten’s favorite terms) so often rings false, because it is coupled with a floridly stylistic preciousness, which Wes Anderson could pull off (at least with Owen Wilson, in his early films) but no one else seems able to nail. Occasionally Life & Death seems to be hitting this false note as well, and these are its weakest moments. It is far stronger when it allows Sellers’ narcissism to seize control of the film and make the viewer complicit in his sociopathic negation of all which interrupts his shallow pursuit of the good life.

Yet when Sellers closes the door on us in the finale, to the tune of the jaunty Kinks, he’s subverting not only the movie’s previous, and seemingly sincere, poignant conclusion (a welcome subversion, despite the Swiss finale’s admitted effectiveness) nor the film’s final attempt at narrative believability. He is also effacing the very conceit of the movie and of biopics in general: that a person can be unveiled for us onscreen (the best biopic ever, unsurprisingly also a work of fiction, both humors and shatters this convention with its elusive “Rosebud”). And with this gesture, Sellers and the filmmakers also, quite subtly, bellow out one last clarion call for humanism: there is an offscreen after all, and all the glib fireworks and magic tricks have not been the substance, but rather the articles of concealment. “Can’t come in here,” Sellers tells us before closing the door.

At least he’s honest about it.