Post by StevePulaski on Mar 19, 2017 13:00:13 GMT -5
Zelig (1983)
Directed by: Woody Allen
Directed by: Woody Allen
Woody Allen (front and center) in Zelig.
Rating: ★★½
Woody Allen's experimental edge has ostensibly been sidelined to be favored and embraced only by the most hardcore Allen fans, who have made it a priority to see all of the prolific director's films (47 as of 2016). Zelig sits alongside Sleeper in that respect in terms of being a laudable technical achievement above anything, with Allen, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and editor Susan E. Morse doing their part to place Allen's "chameleon" character Leonard Zelig in a number of historically significant moments.
It's quite possible, even with the new and surprising heights cinema reaches each and every day, that we will never get another scene quite like the one in Zelig where the Jewish Woody Allen, who stands in a rally behind Adolf Hitler in Nuremberg thanks to the wonders of technology, waves to his girlfriend from afar, who is watching Hitler give his speech.
The film is set in the late 1920s and early 1930s around the aforementioned Zelig, a man who has long possessed the uncanny ability to transform himself into the people that surround him. Coined by the media as a "human chameleon," Zelig's first notable moment of adapting to his surroundings what at a party thrown by Great Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the party, Zelig was politicking with the wealthy guests and sharing Republican ideology until he went into the kitchen with the lowly servants to the affluent party-goers and adopted a more working class tone with Democratic sympathies.
Zelig is clearly a psychological anomaly, and much like his ever-changing state, what exactly defines him in a medical sense is a gray area. Debates range on from psychologists whether or not he is a product of conformist tendencies, lacking a realized concept of his own self, or he is neurotic, hungry for acceptance amongst his peers. Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is a psychiatrist and hypnotist tasked with trying to define Zelig's condition, but winds up doing more harm than good to his fragile mind as a result.
Zelig is a mockumentary, conducted like a Ken Burns documentary with loads of archival footage and a lot of droll narration. Zelig speaks only infrequently, which leads me to wonder what would've happened if Zelig wasn't a character we got to know from his own words. If Allen had challenged himself and the audience to view this psychologically unique character from the perspective of filmmakers, that would have made a film that had us understanding Zelig from a biased or even unreliable narrator. The fact that Zelig does indeed speak a handful of times during the film makes it feel as if Allen didn't want to commit to that idea, but also didn't know how to make a film that could be entirely a mockumentary or about Zelig from Zelig's point of view.
Because of this, and the fact that Allen's humor style is used almost too sparingly throughout the film, Zelig sits with me as a low-key technical marvel first and foremost. The seamless incorporation of Allen's character into a variety of events through the use of editing tricks, period-specific camera lens and equipment, and attention to detail with grainy filmstock and scratched negatives makes the film impressive on every aesthetic level. Allen has not been one to always tamper with the medium of film, but perhaps after garnering such high praise and commercial success with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), the director wanted to take a risk by not only doing something completely and totally out of his element, but making a parody of the most straight-forward genre in film and infusing it with typical Woody Allen elements.
Zelig is a treat, but not a perfect one. It lacks the comic zest of Allen's richest works, and leans too heavily on the technical impressions it leaves on the viewer to work on all cylinders. Its technical side, however, is tremendous and richly conceived, and it's a film you could very well go on to believe that nobody but Allen could've made, perhaps even making this the film to solidify his directorial touch.
Starring: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Directed by: Woody Allen.