Like most movie bios, Life And Death can't help but raise questions about just how true it all is, though to their credit, both writers and director encourage this by throwing their own filmmaking artifice in the viewer's face. In one moment, for instance, a post-Strangelove Sellers has a dream patterned after the ending of 2001, with the comedian surrounded by visions of all the characters he's played. In another, what we first take to be a conversation in a moving car turns out to be a movie car with rear screen projection.

For me, Life And Death best works the closer we get to the actor and the movies he made. We learn, for instance, that he was not Blake Edwards' first choice to play that most-enduring character, Inspector Clouseau, and that he was offered this star-making role only after Peter Ustinov turned it down. At first reacting to the offer as if being given "sloppy seconds," Sellers sniffs that the title Pink Panther "sounds like a bloody strip club!" On the set of the big-budget disaster, Casino Royale, the actor initially refuses to play any of his "characters," instead portraying one of the movie's multiple James Bonds straight. When this inevitably fails, he retreats to Clouseau-ian pratfalls.

Unfortunately, the movie most hedges its bets when it comes to actually detailing Sellers' comic craft. Though it's clear from so much of the unfunny material surrounding his scenes in ensemble flicks like the first Pink Panther or Royale that the comedian's gift for improv lifted many a movie, the degree to which this was true is never clearly examined. (Why no reference to Blake Edwards' The Party, a comedy that was supposed to be primarily improvised? Is it because the movie isn't very good?) Even if it is true that the key to Sellers' ability to inhabit so many great comic characters resided in his barrenness as an actual human being, that doesn't really get to the core of his success as a movie comedian. If only Hopkins' bio flick had focused just a little bit more on this most enduring part of the Life of Peter Sellers. . .