Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen THE INVISIBLE NAN YOU ARE WHAT YOU MEET A DIFFERENCE between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton is that only the latter makes you burst out laughing. Dwight MacDonald pointed this out years...
...The result of all this, as I said before, is brilliant...
...Willis has literally made Zelig into the face in the crowd Allen wants him to be...
...To be a Zelig you'd have to be incredibly famous, instantly recognizable the whole world over, and at the same time painfully shy, nervous, insecure - as Woody Allen is...
...Aside from these few minutes, however, Allen doesn't allow himself to do his familiar schtick...
...Dwight MacDonald pointed this out years ago...
...He keeps himself, as a comedian, out of it...
...Allen's Zelig is a reincarnation of Chaplin's Tramp...
...He remains true to Zelig's character, which is to have no character, to be a chameleon...
...The movie sees the modern celebrity as a kind of Everyman figure - someone who is all things to all people, and a nobody to himself...
...Decorously, and with glances of apology both to other passengers and to history for his tonsorial anachronism, he replaces the stovepipe with his familiar porkpie...
...I always wanted him to be better at providing those spontaneous touches, the little grace notes of comedy, that make me crack up at a Keaton movie...
...But the points in his movies where you recognize this are not ones that bring tears of laughter to your eyes...
...Zelig is Woody Allen's most personal film since Annie Hall...
...Zelig is a parody of Reds, Keaton's big hit with her new boyfriend, Warren Beatty...
...In Zelig Allen achieves an insight into his predicament that eluded him in the earlier movie...
...But Zelig is not just whimsy...
...While lovers come and go, the abiding problem in Allen's life, the one that won't go away, is his own celebrity...
...He becomes more objective about himself...
...Woody Allen's movie is a documentary about a fictitious character who was a phenomenon in the 1920s, but is now forgotten...
...The first thing Dr...
...The film is a meditation on fame, on the emptiness of it...
...They move with the same brittle jerkiness as everyone else...
...The pure originality of Allen's idea, the clarity of his conception, is what succeeds here...
...a tickertape parade...
...My favorite is when he boards an antiquated train in Our Hospitality wearing a stovepipe hat that won't fit under the coach's low ceiling...
...If I find the movie disconcerting, that is only because brilliance sheds an eerie kind of light - a cool blue light that ultimately leaves us more bemused than amused...
...The title character, Leonard Zelig, is a man famous for being famous...
...The finest moments in Chaplin's films - Adenoid Hinckle's ballet with the globe of the world in The Great Dictator, or Little Fellow being fed through the glass of a monstrous machine in Modern Times - don't strike me with the same immediacy...
...Zelig is brilliant, too...
...The truth is that Chaplin is the greater genius...
...Matte shots, where one image is overlaid on another, have become extremely sophisticated in recent years because of space epics like Star Wars...
...It was never Keaton he was on his way to becoming, but Chaplin...
...The film's first master stroke is to be set in the twenties, which was the age that invented modern phenomena of this sort...
...At a party in a Chicago speakeasy, he hobnobs with reputed gangsters, then sits in on clarinet with the Negro jazz band...
...A higher amusement is...
...The psychiatric interviews between doctor and patient are the funniest routine in the film...
...Fletcher has to do is disabuse Zelig of his delusion, whenever he's with her, that he's also a psychiatrist...
...Leonard Zelig is a zero, a cipher...
...But with Annie Hall, his work turned in a different direction altogether...
...Through all the years of Allen's straight comedies, from Take the Money and Run to Sleeper, I criticized him for not being Keatonesque enough...
...He is, as they used to say, a suitable case for treatment...
...In the first glimpse we get of him, Zelig is being awarded the brightest honor that period could bestow...
...It was angry and confused...
...The documentary focuses on the attempts made by his psychiatrist, Dr...
...He is dispassionate...
...Zelig's is a personality that can split itself into a hundred different people...
...It is, for one thing, an in-joke that Allen and his current girlfriend, Mia Farrow, are playing on his co-star in Annie, Diane Keaton, who was his girl then...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...I just can't help guffawing...
...He's the batter on deck while Ruth is at the plate, the storm trooper milling with other Brown Shirts in the street behind Hitler...
...Laughter of the sort that provokes is not what he's after here...
...Zelig is the meditation on fame that Allen attempted, but botched, in Stardust Memories...
...Eudora Fletcher (Farrow), to cure him of his compulsive adaptability...
...There are little moments in a Keaton film, surprising and fleeting gestures of accommodation, that make us laugh at the sheer humanity of the character he portrays...
...Allen's occasional cynicism is just another form of Chaplin's sentimentality...
...That's brilliant, you murmur to yourself...
...His idea of comedy is larger than Keaton's, his insight into humanity more piercing...
...And Allen adds the finishing touch to the film's bogus authenticity in the form of interviews with contemporary intellectuals - Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow - who comment ponderously on Zelig's place in history...
...Zelig is Allen's Modern Times...
...He emerges from the somewhat black humor of his Zelig character like the sun from an overcast sky...
...Just as a technical feat, Zelig is stunning...
...What makes these scenes funny is that the loquacious, neurotic Woody we all know and love momentarily appears...
...Wherever the rich, the noted, the newsworthy gather, Zelig is there...
...Zelig is a cerebral comedy...
...Stardust Memories was a resentful film...
...He is the grandest impostor of all time...
...Left alone in a room, he would have an identity crisis...
...He's Charles Lindbergh, the quintessential twenties figure, someone who becomes the most famous of them all simply by being such a modest, unassuming likable guy...
...Allen makes ingenious new use of this technique by inserting Zelig not only in still photographs, but in motion sequences...
...The new film gets to the heart of the paradox that celebrity contains for Allen...
...In an era of flag-pole sitters, a man celebrated for being a gate-crasher is completely credible...
...Willis makes all the footage of Allen and Farrow alone compatible with the old black-and-white stock...
...Much credit has to go to director of photography, Gordon Willis, for the trick here was to balance the light between the new footage and the wavering, scratchy look of old newsreels...
...Instead, you sigh with satisfaction at the rightness of the image before you...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
