Celebrity
One of Woody Allen’s most frustrating films. A convincing and detailed love story, derailed by a handful of bizarre missteps and a hopelessly outdated view of popular culture.
1. Kenneth Branagh’s performance, on first viewing, is nothing but an unapologetic impression of Woody, and is hugely distracting for that reason. Only in later viewings can one appreciate it for what it is, a VERY GOOD impression of Woody. He’s got it all down, the stammerings, the body language, the gestures. That he manages to get any human feeling across in the midst of this highly detailed stunt is an accomplishment all by itself.
There is another performance that comes to mind in this regard, Clint Eastwood does a feature-length impression of John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart. Again, it fascinates partly because Eastwood is not known for his facility with impressions, and partly because he manages to pull it off. Eastwood, a movie star of the highest magnitude, only occasionally attempts to play an actual role, but he’s impressive in this and in another picture of the era, Heartbreak Ridge.
2. The film is lovingly shot and even more lovingly produced. Not many people will recall that, as the ’90s drew to a close, Woody Allen shocked New Yorkers by declaring that his budgets were going to be drastically reduced and that even things like free coffee for the crew would be eliminated. Celebrity was the first film in his new austerity program, but instead looks like one of the most lavishly produced films of his career, packed with name actors in bit parts, dozens of locations, sophisticated camerawork involving complicated lighting schemes.
INSIDER GOSSIP: the great Sven Nykvist, who shot 3 Allen movies prior to this one, once complained to me that he disliked working with Woody Allen because his camera setups were dull and unimaginative. He must have been happier with Celebrity, where the camera rarely stops moving and there is a lot of emphasis on foreground and background, faces moving in and out of frame and many complicated crowd scenes.
3. Among the actors who flit in and out of the movie are JK Simmons, Dylan Baker, Allison Janney, Adam Grenier, Sam Rockwell, Jeffrey Wright, Mark Addy and no fewer than 3 future Sopranos.
The cast is mostly wonderful and occasionally brilliant. Leonardo DiCaprio shows up halfway through the movie and practically burns a hole in the screen.
4. Well-observed, witty and erudite scenes of show-business lives occasionally butt straight up against broad, farcical physical comedy. The strangest of these scenes involves Bebe Neuwirth choking on a piece of banana.
5. As I say, there’s a decent love story somewhere in here. Removing all the references to our wicked culture of celebrity, we have Kenneth Branagh, who is turning middle aged and feels like he hasn’t lived yet. So he breaks up with his dowdy, repressed wife (Judy Davis, teetering on the edge of self-parody) and pursues a number of women. He has meaningless sex with a movie star, pursues and fails to catch a fashion model, lands a beautiful, smart, talented book editor, then throws that relationship away in order to get involved with a shallow, insipid young actress. Meanwhile, Judy Davis has a nervous breakdown, meets a TV producer, goes to work on his show, ends up becoming an on-air personality, gives up worrying about meaningful things, and becomes happy and fulfilled.
Right there is an interesting, heartfelt, well-written contemporary love story (well, perhaps not “contemporary;” Branagh, who’s almost exactly my age, has the attitudes of a man almost twice his age, and does not own a computer, allowing for a lame “only copy of my manuscript” plot point). Almost a remake of Manhattan in this regard, the luminous black-and-white photography making the connection even clearer.
6. The problem is, the love story is freighted with an “important,” “scathing” critique of our current culture of celebrity which, news flash, Woody Allen finds wanting.
This is the man who, in Annie Hall, equated Bob Dylan with Alice Cooper and the Maharishi, all in one scene. This is a man who, although born the same year as Elvis Presley, seems to listen only to music made before he was born, who rolled his eyes at punk rock (in 1986, on time for him) in Hannah and Her Sisters (SILLY PERSON: Don’t you just love songs about extraterrestrials? WOODY: Not when they’re sung by extraterrestrials!). His attitude seems closer to that of someone like Steve Allen, who always maintained that Elvis Presley was a no-talent hack dancing at the pleasure of his money-raking puppet-masters.
There is no accounting for taste. I don’t care for rap music, but I wouldn’t write a movie about it where I complained about it being a clattering racket made by foul-mouthed idiots. And the parts of Celebrity that deal with the general culture and steer clear of individual cases are brilliantly brought to life and work just fine. But when he tsks and sneers at Joey Buttafuoco and suggests that skinheads and the obese are not worth celebration, it makes the whole movie seem stale and remote, when in fact it is one of his most vibrant and lived-in pictures.
I wonder, who does he think will be going to see this movie? Does he think there is an audience out there who will say “Wow, I guess he’s right, now that I think of it, our culture DOES tear down the worthy and celebrate the worthless!” If such a person existed, why would they be going to see a black-and-white Woody Allen movie? No, in these moments he’s patting himself on the back and inviting us to sneer along with him.
Sure, there’s a lot of garbage in our culture. But the finer arts have always appealed to a more limited audience. And a lot of it will be forgotten and the good products of this exact same culture will live on, just like always, which will make those moments of Celebrity all the more baffling to future audiences.
