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November 20, 1998/ 1 Kislev 5759, Vol. 51, No. 9
Branagh delivers Woody Allen's angst in 'Celebrity'
ANNE BRADY
Associate Editor
Listen up, all you diehard Woody Allen fans who have spent your lives savoring Allen's portrayals of male lead characters filled with neurotic, Jewish angst, plagued by relationships with women as confused as they are, searching for God and for some sense of meaning in a hopeless existence.
Have you been agonizing over the fact that although in real life Allen has married a woman young enough to be his granddaughter, and who is actually his former lover's adopted daughter, he nevertheless looks too old finally to play a middle-aged hero? Sure, Allen can continue to write and direct, you've said to yourself, but no one will believe an elderly man is having a mid-life crisis.
Rejoice! Allen (and his casting agent) have found an actor, Kenneth Branagh, who is younger and better looking than Allen, but who can deliver every stammer, every vowel sound, every hapless gesture, every rhetorical, superfluous question ("What do you mean, is it my car? What am I? A car thief? Of course, it's mine."), every bit of angst ("I'm awash in self-contempt") that make up the pathetic, classic character Allen created and repeated on film throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s.
Close your eyes, and it's Allen. Open them, and it's a better looking version of Jerry Springer. It's almost scary, but if Branagh sticks with it, a whole 'nother generation could grow up with Allen's wonderfully bizarre take on life.
In "Celebrity," written and directed by Allen and starring Branagh as the middle-aged-crisis character who also happens to be a writer, Allen takes a look at who becomes famous and why, and what people will go through to achieve happiness, success and good sex.
Allen makes wry commentary on the fleeting fame of the Nazis, African Americans and Jews who appear on Springer-type shows. When preparing for taping of a daytime program, a staffer puts a rabbi in the same room to wait with a pack of skinheads, and the rabbi complains, "Where are the bagels? The skinheads ate all the bagels already?" In another room, Ku Klux Klan members shake hands with a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a black minister is ushered in to join them. Obviously, they're all doing this for 15 minutes of fame - and the bagels.
Allen also takes shots at Catholics. It seems that growing up Catholic has so traumatized our hero's first wife, that when she is performing oral sex, she thinks of the crucifixion. Then there is the peddler with the statue of the sacred heart (the one of Jesus, with an exposed heart outside his clothing, wrapped in thorns) that "bleeds" red vegetable dye from its palms when a bulb is squeezed.
Of course, we'll just have to take his word for it that the dye is red because the film is in black-and-white. Why? Who knows. Perhaps the answer lies in a scene in which the protagonist ridicules a film director by calling him "a pretentious, artsy asshole who shoots all his films in black-and-white."
The best part of the film is a long, involved series of scenes in which our writer-hero is attempting to convince a boorish, young movie star, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to do his screenplay. Branagh blows off a scheduled interview with the mayor's wife, for a magazine story assignment, to accompany DiCaprio on a trip to Atlantic City, where Branagh attempts to discuss his script while losing $6,000 at a craps table, and even while the two men are frolicking with two women in the same room.
It's all great fun, even though much of it is totally unbelievable, including the notion that a 41-year-old writer today would type up a book on a manual typewriter (and keep only that one copy, mind you). Maybe that's the problem with having a 60-something writer and a 40-something leading character.
True Woody Allen fans will look past such shortcomings and rejoice that the genre lives on.
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