A few weeks ago, I posted a few brief thoughts on the films written by Ann Peacock, who also wrote the first draft of the upcoming film version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the time, I said that, based on her other films, I was glad that the script had been given to other writers after her — namely, to Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. But these two writers have only one other film to their names so far — namely The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) — and at the time, I had not yet seen it.
But now I have. And it’s probably as good as a dramatization of the life of Sellers could hope to be, even if the film’s interpretation of certain episodes from Sellers’ life is open to question.
For example, in this film, Sellers fakes his sprained leg on the set of Dr. Strangelove (1964) in order to get out of playing the Slim Pickens character, but in a making-of feature on the Dr. Strangelove DVD, an actor says he Sellers actually fell and broke his leg on the set itself; I am not enough of a Strangelove scholar to say with confidence whose story is closest to the truth, but at the moment I lean towards the story told by the actor.
The gimmick of having Sellers play the various people in his life is a handy way to encapsulate his self-centredness, his talent for mimickry, and his inability to look directly at his own self. Markus and McFeely have a writers’ commentary track all to themselves, and they note how ironic it was that Sellers was both self-centred yet utterly incapable of introspection; rather than try to understand himself, he relied all too much on the advice of others, including his domineering mother, his tolerant ex-wife, and a medium who was apparently taking his cue from the studios when he claimed to be receiving messages from the spirit world.
I think the filmmakers may have been a little too in love with Dr. Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick when they made this film — there are nods to The Shining (1980) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), even though Sellers did not work on those films; and unless I blinked, there are no nods to Lolita (1962), which is one of the two Kubrick films Sellers did work on. Then again, the scenes that make these references do work, so I shan’t complain.
But when all is said and done, I have to say I prefer documentaries like The Peter Sellers Story — As He Filmed It (2002; my comments) to dramatizations like this one, however well-made.
Two further comments on the writers’ commentary. One, it is interesting to hear them admit that some of the film’s funniest lines were improvised by Geoffrey Rush, and in one case, one of the writers finally “gets” the funny line in question while the commentary is being recorded! Two, since this was their first produced screenplay, they remark that there were a number of things that got repeated in their script which were cut down in the actual film; they make the interesting point that repetition works and is even necessary on the page, but on the screen, it is not so necessary, and at times it may even be a hindrance.
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