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R: ARCHIVE, S: MOVIES, D: 11/19/1998, B: Peter Keough,

Defamed

Woody's star wanes with Celebrity

by Peter Keough

CELEBRITY, Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Joe Mantegna, Famke Janssen, Winona Ryder, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hank Azaria, Melanie Griffith, Michael Lerner, Bebe Neuwirth, and Charlize Theron. A Miramax Films release.

One of the year's funniest comedies features a character who acts and sounds like Woody Allen; the movie is Antz, in which Allen voices an animated insect. As for Woody's own latest effort, Celebrity, in which Kenneth Branagh imitates the director's whining stammer with annoying insistence, it's a reminder of how much Allen's once arch and incisive wit (the kind you find in Antz) has become "solipsistic, sophomoric, and self-indulgent."

The name game

NEW YORK -- If celebrity means much to Woody Allen, he doesn't show it. His new film, called Celebrity, is a broad satire on our culture's obsession with fame, but when it premiered with a life-imitates-art gala at the recent New York Film Festival, Allen was too busy shooting his next movie, in a railyard in Queens, to attend.

The film is filled with bizarre intersections of real fame and reel fame -- like the cameo by Leonardo DiCaprio (cast before his Titanic superstardom) as a spoiled movie hunk. "I didn't know who he was," insists Allen. "I saw Leo in Marvin's Room because Diane Keaton, who I'm very close with, was in the picture. So we sent him the material, and he wanted to do it."

That DiCaprio became what he played in the film even before Celebrity's release points up the difficulty a contemporary satirist has in keeping up with reality. "You almost can't," notes Allen. "I was trying to write about the phenomenon of celebrity within our culture. In every aspect of the culture, in every aspect of life, there are celebrities, so Joey Buttafuoco gets a television show, and a guy walks down the street with a sweatshirt and Charles Manson's picture is on it. And [in the film] Bebe Neuwirth plays a fellatrix who is the star in her area. Who would ever know that every day in the headlines, oral sex would be the topic of the day? But that's what happens when you're writing something that's contemporary. The culture moves so quickly and is so volatile that these things happen, for better or worse. They can make you lucky to cash in on something or outdated like that" -- Allen snaps his fingers.

One character observes that you can tell a lot about a culture by those whom it chooses to celebrate, but what do our current choices of celebrities say about us? "That's the good question," shrugs Allen. "That is beyond me. I know that the phenomenon exists, but I need someone deeper than me to be able to pull that together, somebody like Norman Mailer or Camille Paglia, somebody that's good at social insight."

Can our celebrity dependence be reduced? "Not now. I don't see any way out of that now. There's such a devouring search for material, for things to fill up the news hours. So they grasp at people, and the country likes the excitement. It's almost as if fiction doesn't excite them as much anymore as the real-life things that were played out in the O.J. Simpson trial or the Monica Lewinsky thing or Court TV. They need a real thing to latch onto. It's a step beyond. They're sort of jaded with -- you don't see that many Broadway shows that are about people that aren't glitzy musicals, or films that are about people. They're getting their human-interaction entertainment from the news and Court TV and watching real people on television."

Allen himself has long been famous -- and thanks to his personal life, which has settled down this year with his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, sometimes infamous. "It's very tempting to want to be in the celebrity culture because it has enormous perquisites. On the other hand, there are some real drawbacks. In the end, I think the perquisites outweigh the drawbacks. Those people who are in the celebrated life whine about it and complain about it, and there's plenty to complain about. But in the end, the perquisites that they experience are better than the average person's, and most people would trade for it."

Of his own celebrity, the 62-year-old Allen still claims, "It's a complete surprise to me. I was a writer for years and stayed in a room, isolated. And suddenly, I started performing and was immediately successful. I had no idea why. I asked this question of my agents and managers, what do I have that somebody else doesn't have? This guy's getting just as many laughs as I'm getting. Why do they want to hire me back? I could never figure it out. I was always thankful for it. It's like, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

"To this day, I'll watch films with Diane Keaton that we're in, when we're making a film, when we see our dailies, and she'll think, `Gee, we're just two such jerks up there. What is it that people are responding to?' I never know. It's just amazing to me. I couldn't be more surprised. And also happy, delighted."

-- Gary Susman

That's the critical verdict on a first novel published by Branagh's Lee Simon, a trash journalist and would-be romantic striver coming to grips with his fate as a generally unpleasant and mediocre human being. His dreams of literary success, true love, and a meaningful life rebuffed, Simon turns his skills to the entertainment world, where he mixes business with pleasure, wheedling his celebrity interviews into casual sex or screenplay pitches.

It's La dolce vita soured by '90s pop-culture clichés and Allen's mean-spirited imagination (his satiric eye and savvy are on the level of Entertainment Tonight). He has none of Fellini's depth of melancholy or joie de vivre -- not to mention that director's visual style, though Sven Nykvist's black-and-white photography has a crisp efficiency.

Neither is Branagh any Marcello Mastroianni; he appears to have gained 20 pounds and aged 10 years, but somehow he almost scores with the likes of Melanie Griffith's superstar actress (only from the waist up, though -- she's faithful to her husband), Charlize Theron's Valkyrie supermodel (not having echinacea on hand proves a drawback), and Winona Ryder's opportunistic ingenue (that he created her in his novel is his fatuous delusion). Long before he fails to get it up in a foursome with a hotel-and-girlfriend-trashing Leonardo DiCaprio, his smarmy roguishness has ceased to amuse.

More sympathetic is Simon's ex, Robin (a splenetic Judy Davis in a rare middling performance). A convent-raised neurotic Catholic stereotype with sexual hang-ups who teaches English literature (her ascribing Beowulf to Chaucer makes her imminent career change a smart move), she gets in touch with her sensual side when she bumps into TV producer Tony Gardella (Joe Mantegna, with too much salt of the earth and not enough garlic) while he's taping a show about the trendy cosmetic surgeon she's visiting (one of the film's more thuddingly unfunny and distasteful sequences). Being Italian, Tony is uninhibited not only about his sexuality but about his bad taste as well. He coaxes Robin to take a turn before the camera as the host of a talk show and -- voilà! -- a celebrity is born. As Robin sees it, she has become the kind of person she used to make fun of, and she loves it.

So too, apparently, has Allen. Early in his career his comedy skewered pretenses, but for some time now it's been the other way around. Not that Celebrity is without funny moments. Some classic Allen set pieces -- a book-signing party, a class reunion, and behind the scenes at a TV station ("So the skinheads ate all the bagels?") -- don't disappoint. An oral-sex symposium involving Robin and a happy hooker played by Bebe Neuwirth manages some hilarious new mileage from an old routine. But Neuwirth's gag reflex is in better shape than the filmmaker's, and much of the humor is choked with self-loathing and sado-masochism.

Then there are the glimmers of genuine self-reflection. When he's not embarrassing himself by doing Woody Allen, Branagh can be effective in depicting middle-aged infantilism, portraying someone so keen on getting what he thinks he's losing out on that he loses everything he's got. That comes through most tellingly at the film's end, when the film-within-a-film that we saw shot at the beginning of Celebrity is premiered. In the audience is the wreckage of Simon's life, and on the screen a plane writes a single word across the sky: "HELP."