Celebrity (1998)
Director: Woody Allen Cast: Hank Azaria, Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Melanie Griffith, Famke Janssen, Michael Lerner, Joe Mantegna, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, Dylan Baker, Screenplay: Woody Allen Producer: Jean Doumanian Runtime: 113 min. US Distribution: Miramax Rated R: language, sex, drug use
Copyright 1998 Nathaniel R. Atcheson
If you're going to make a two-hour Hollywood in-joke, why bother releasing it to the general public? If you're going to create a film that will appeal primarily to big-name actors and People Who Know Woody Allen, then why waste the time of the rest of us peons by playing it in theaters? While watching Celebrity, I realized that Allen had only marginal interest in creating a story about real people. What he really wanted to do was continue on his recent kick of conceited self-deprecation. Celebrity is yet another film in which Allen tells a story about himself, living in a world that he's familiar with, dealing with people like the ones he actually knows.
Allen recruited poor Kenneth Branagh to bumble through this picture, in an imitation of Allen so perfect that it almost made me like the film more. Branagh plays Lee Simon, a journalist-turned-screenwriter who divorces his wife, Robin (Judy Davis), shacks up with some hot women (Famke Janssen, Charlize Theron, Winona Ryder), and goes about trying to get big stars (Melanie Griffith, Leonardo DiCaprio) to read his script about an armored car robbery. The usual elements of recent Allen films are all here, including the sexual insecurity of the main character, lots of self-loathing women, and a tiring continuum of episodes that are only loosely related to one another.
Unless you work in the film industry or know Woody Allen personally, it's not likely that you'll find a whole lot of interest in Celebrity. Aside from all the in-jokes, the story falls far short of compelling, and the characters are all empty and lifeless. Branagh proves once again that he's a superb performer, nailing his imitation of Allen flawlessly. The problem is that he's the same character Allen always plays, a character who's getting more than a little dull to watch. I mean, come on, how many times have you seen this guy? -- he hates his work, and he can't be satisfied by any one woman, and, at the end of the movie, nothing has been solved. He brings all of his problems upon himself (crashing his car because he's receiving fellatio, and other such stunts), so it's pretty hard to care about him. In addition, isn't Allen capable of creating characters who aren't just like him? I know he is, but he didn't do it in Celebrity.
The vacant emotional attachment with the main character is not recaptured in the supporting performances. Davis, playing the same woman with low self-esteem that she played in Deconstructing Harry, has a few touching moments, but ends up the same despicable celebrity-type that fills the rest of the movie. Some of the actresses are saved because of their beauty -- Theron and Ryder, especially -- but they're not likable people. Only Famke Janssen, as a book editor interested in Simon's new novel, has any life. The men in the picture don't do much better -- Joe Mantegna is pretty dull as the man who remarries Robin, while DiCaprio, as a Christian Slater/Johnny Depp-type spoiled young actor, is funny but disengaging.
What's really insulting about Celebrity is how dull and standard its "themes" are. Allen seems to think that he's making an insightful movie about the way "normal" people look at celebrities. The main problem with this is that the character with whom we're supposed to identify, Simon, is not a "normal" guy -- he's just as entrenched in the Hollywood image as the rest of the characters. The other problem is that the image we get of these celebrities is no more enlightening than the view the media gives us -- none of them register as realistic, interesting characters; they mostly just function as set pieces for boring dialogue. In addition, Allen decides he needs a scene in which the theme is expressed explicitly (Robin, in this scene, says something like, "It's interesting to see the way we all look at the people we celebrate!").
Celebrity is arguably Allen's biggest misfire to date. It does have a few good scenes -- Theron's super-orgasmic model character is kind of funny, and the last scene might have been moving had the rest of the film shown us a character or two. But Celebrity is a failure at the core, unless Allen's point was to make a self-indulgent movie about himself and his friends. If he wanted to make his audience feel like they were on the outside of a big joke, then he succeeded in that. I, for one, don't enjoy feeling like an outsider.
Psychosis Rating: 3/10
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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