A courageous return to form, Woody Allen's 27th film is his darkest but most successful outing in 10 years. Eschewing the elaborate forms used in some of his more recent movies - such as the Greek chorus in Mighty Aphrodite and the musical sequences of Everyone Says I Love You - Celebrity draws on a simple theme and overlays it with an extraordinarily confident moral authority and humanity.
In this latest film, Allen both dismantles and vindicates Andy Warhol's famous dictum about everyone getting their 15 minutes' worth. An intricate ensemble piece with more than 200 speaking parts and around 30 characters of note, Celebrity essentially centres on the selfish egomaniac Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh playing Woody Allen to perfection), a celebrity interviewer and aspiring novelist, and his wife Robin (Judy Davis), a teacher with few professional aspirations. After they part ways, the film follows the people that they stalk or accidently stumble across, and two subsequent meetings with each other.
Full of coincidences and seemingly random twists and turns, while the structure of Celebrity is deceptively rambling, the film is quite the opposite. Designed and shaped to perfection, every detail in Celebrity adds to and comments upon other characters, incidents or themes. When the Times book critic describes Lee's previous fiction as solipsistic at a party thrown by a senior New York editor, we note he is drinking coffee. A handful of other scenes are also deliciously funny: Lee's school reunion, his car-crash as he is being seduced by a catwalk supermodel and the film screening in which Robin and Lee run into each other again are all vintage Allen.
The focus on American fame and media has echoes of Radio Days, and the feel of the movie is not entirely dissimilar, though the scope is larger. It is also a significantly more subtle, rewarding and darker movie. Having been lucky with several beautiful women, Lee gets his comeuppance with an aspiring actress, Nola (Winona Ryder), and while their scenes carry both humour and a sexy, romantic dialogue, their relationship is painted with a darker hue which carries the film through to its downbeat conclusion.
If there is a criticism of Celebrity, it is a minor one. Almost all of the main characters are either humane or deeply self-centred individuals and occasionally this presumably deliberate dichotomy can feel an unnecessarily artificial burden on the structure. But Celebrity is an audacious, masterful piece of movie-making, beautifully photographed in lugubrious black and white by Sven Nykvist. It is unlikely to be bettered by an American director in this last year of the millenium and is certainly one of the best half-dozen movies of Woody Allen's career to date.
Reviewed by Douglas McCabe
Reader comments about Celebrity
christophe keranen (fintalian@hotmail.com) writes:
like most woody fans, we have seen a lot of famous and new talent in his movies playing unsuspecting characters working out pointless elevating yet cute melodramas. in the dozens of past pictures woody stars as himself. the woody in front of the camera is a person unto himself. this never gets tiresome, because the stories are always oringal even though the character is the same everytime. Although there are a few cases when he trades places with another actor to play himself. in this case it is Kenneth Branagh. using the same vocal tones and stuttered dialogue as woody would have, Celebrity is a wonderful movie if you can accept not seeing woody allen in the picture but still watching his character being played by someone else. check it out, it's in black and white.
nicky decurtis (Email address withheld) writes:
Celebrity, you can take it at face value, which would give you a long seemingly rambling piece about attractive celebrity status and the ugly aspiring, or you can look underneath, and see an increadibly real story about the frailty of a human being, trying to deal with the unhuman. Both are valid ways.
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