Peter Sellers used to say that there was once a real "him" but he'd had it surgically removed. Unfortunately, this tricksy and overelaborate biopic leaves you feeling as if you had been staring at the amputated stump for two hours.
Director Stephen Hopkins takes us from Sellers' radio days as the plumply cheerful Goon - with no more obvious Hollywood potential than, say, Michael Bentine - to his striking Hollywood gold with Dr Strangelove and Inspector Clouseau, then the grim 1970s procession of endless mediocre Panther sequels. Geoffrey Rush is Sellers; Emily Watson and Charlize Theron play his first and second wives, Anne Sellers and Britt Ekland; Stanley Tucci is Kubrick and Miriam Margolyes his beloved mum, Peg.
There is plenty of stunning period detail and hellzapoppin' fantasy set pieces, including, inevitably, a dream sequence as Sellers lies on the brink of death after a heart attack. But there is no real insight into the man himself, other than trite platitudes about the clown's private pain, which manifests itself in cruelty to his wives, his children and himself. Hopkins seems unsure whether Sellers is a genius or an overrated impersonator riding a fluke, and is clearly very uncertain indeed whether to endorse the 1980 film Being There as the alleged redemptive masterpiece up to which Sellers' whole unhappy life had been leading.
The movie is especially unconvincing when it has Sellers step out of frame, as it were, and imitate the people in his life with the aid of wigs and costumes, making shrewd, barbed comments in their personae. It's irritating; it undermines the off-camera reality in which the movie is asking us to take an interest. It also misunderstands Sellers' love of impersonations and wacky voices: they enabled him to escape from real life and demonstrated, consciously or not, his emotional autism and lack of interest and insight into other people's lives.
John Lithgow does a decent job as the Panther director Edwards, descending into weary unhappiness in tandem with Sellers, and Rush is perhaps the only plausible casting as the lead. They cannot, however, inject life into this superficial and unsatisfying film.