Is it unusual?
Strangelove, strange highs and strange lows…
So I’ve seen the Peter Sellers movie…is it unusual to say I enjoyed a movie that left me with such a feeling of melancholia? Certainly if you just like to appreciate performances, there’s enough in Geoffrey Rush to make you wonder why on earth this didn’t get a theatrical release–he’d be competition for Jaime Foxx in the Academy Awards for sure.
A confrontation between Rush as Sellers and Charlize Theron as Brett Ekland is especially well-staged; it’s the seemingly obligitory celebrity marriage breakdown scene, but an explosion, when it comes, is truly shocking and shows up the melodrama of lesser films.
Theron makes the most of a part that’s thinly written, presumably because Ekland is still alive. In the acting awards I also ought to mention Emily Watson as Sellers’s first wife, John Lithgow as Blake Edwards and Peter Vaughan in an uncomfortably real turn as Sellers’ father.
Rush’s performance is the most showy, for obvious (and good and sufficent) reasons, but Watson’s is its equal on a whole other level; it’s the best work I’ve seen her do. Lithgow too is wisely low-key; it’s a truly supporting part.
But the performances, however remarkable, would float off into space (much like Sellers himself, apparently) if not framed by deft direction and a script that approaches the bio-pic from a fresh angle.
How do you make an acceptable portrait of a man who cast no reflection? The movie bounces off Peter and shows us his shilouette cut out of of his family and friends both as they remember him and (this is the film’s conceit) as he would have loved them to be.
Blissfully free of the sort of psychobabble summation that marrs such films as Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, it reveals Sellers in relief of the shadows of what it doesn’t reveal about him.
