The Life and Death of Peter Sellers

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * )

It has become a cliche to say that the mercurial and eccentric British comedian Peter Sellers was a tortured genius.

Tortured he was, though it's tempting to emerge from this exhaustive, not to say exhausting, biopic concluding that he was also a bit of a shit.

As to his genius, unless you are a diehard Goon Show fan, you may think that word best reserved for the likes of Shakespeare and Mozart rather than Ali G and Jim Carrey. Sellers turned in some sublime performances - the multiple roles in Dr Strangelove; Fred Kite in I'm All Right, Jack; Chance in Being There; and moments as Inspector Clouseau. But the majority of his five or six dozen movies were forgettable or execrable.

This film, based on the titanic and harshly judgmental 1994 biography by Roger Lewis, doesn't seek to be a portrait of the artist but of the man.

Since it is dealing with well-ventilated but unpalatable truths - the cruelty and disloyalty, the destructive tantrums, the ludicrously undignified love-life, his fixation on an overbearing mother - it might have been simply a catalogue of unspeakable acts.

But the script - penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe now shooting in New Zealand - takes an inventive approach, conceiving of the film as a Sellers creation, an autobiopic as it were.

It is bookended by Rush's Sellers, alone on a bare soundstage, turning the movie on (and at the end off) on a television set. And throughout he takes over, without warning and just for a scene, most of the other characters.

The idea is a sincere attempt to surmount - or at least sidestep - the obstacle that defeats most artist biopics: the film-maker can't get into the artistic process (Ed Harris' marvellous film about Jackson Pollock was a notable exception) but can show only the output and the human dysfunction.

When Rush impersonates Sellers impersonating his mother, say, or Stanley Kubrick or Britt Ekland, we have an eerie, first-hand sense of his life as a multitude of performances. We see what he meant when he told the BBC interviewer that "there was no [Peter Sellers] there to begin with". But the device remains, for most of the film's length, distractingly visible and Rush struggles to make us empathise with the character.

His mimicry is an extraordinary display of craft, particularly in the re-enactments of film cuts. But as with his other real-life characters - David Helfgott in Shine, de Sade in Quills, Trotsky in Frida - it's hard to get past the craft and see a person.

To some extent that's the fault of a script which ticks off episodes between 1957 and 1980, from the peak of the Goon Show to the actor's death. Subordinate performances - John Lithgow's Blake Edwards, Miriam Margolyes as Sellers' mum, and a brilliant Emily Watson as the long-suffering Anne - are excellent. But the ambitious undertaking must be accounted a magnificent failure. For viewers without a passionate interest in Sellers, or at least Rush, it won't cut the mustard.

CAST: Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron, Emily Watson, John Lithgow, Miriam Margolyes, Peter Vaughan, Stanley Tucci, Stephen Fry

DIRECTOR: Stephen Hopkins

RATING: M (offensive language, sexual references and drug use)

RUNNING TIME: 122 mins

SCREENING: Rialto, Berkeley Mission Bay, St Lukes, Bridgeway from Thursday