Zelig (1983) and Gordon Willis’s Mimicry of Classical Hollywood

Posted on February 1, 2020 by 4 Star Films

I never thought I’d be saying this about a Woody Allen film, but it feels more like a technical marvel than purely a testament to story or dialogue. Although The Purple Rose of Cairo did something similarly compelling, Zelig is literally a film relying on a look that is authentic to a time period. Allen even goes so far as using old-fashioned cameras, lenses, and techniques to try and get them as close to classic filmmaking as possible.

Preceding the cutting-edge footage in Forrest Gump, we have Woody Allen as his alter ego, Leonard Zelig, being inserted in all sorts of images. It’s spliced together in such a seamless way we wonder if some scenes were simply chosen because they featured a lookalike of Allen to fit with the rest of the film.

Shot as an obvious mockumentary, which could be likened to Citizen Kane‘s News Marches On segment, one might concede Zelig is humorous in a similar vein. It’s not like Take The Money and Run (1969), Sleeper (1973), or even Annie Hall (1977), each offering genuinely zany and laugh-out-loud gags.

By playing something so ludicrously out of left field, completely straight, Allen has his comedy. He goes to the furthest extreme to make this feel like a real Ken Burns-esque documentary complete with talking heads giving their dry, poorly lit commentary from the present. They lend this credence, this seemingly real-world ethos, to something so utterly ridiculous. This juxtaposition gets at the humor precisely.

The story itself isn’t much of anything at all, loosely tied together over the course of an hour. Zelig (Woody Allen) is a generally non-descript Jewish man (Allen’s usual archetype) with a curious tendency brought on by an undying need for approval.

Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is intent on helping him and confirming her findings that he is indeed suffering from a chameleon-like disorder, causing him to transform his appearance to assimilate with whoever he’s with. It could be politically, socially occupationally, even racially, as he is found speaking Chinese and frequenting an African-American jazz club in two separate instances.

In the good doctor’s presence, he conveniently thinks he’s also a psychologist trying to do therapy with her, even having a fine approximation of the vocational jargon. But this is just a cursory sign to a much deeper-seated issue.

It turns out he’s unwittingly duped tons of people with wives married, babies delivered, and all sorts of other feats and accomplishments undertaken in different lives. He’s the most interesting man in the world who consequently has no idea about any of his accomplishments.

The laundry list of real-life icons is too delightful to pass over from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Bobby Jones, and the list keeps on going and going. William Randolph Hearts himself (a Kane archetype) and his mistress Marion Davies show up along with Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow, Carole Lombard, Marie Dressler and a host of others I failed to mention. You get the idea. It’s among the ranks of all these folks, Zelig was able to take on his chameleon-like personality and win their friendship.

It also occurred to me that Allen always makes his admiration for Ingmar Bergman fairly obvious. Like the other director’s films, which are always inhabited by interesting female characters, Allen settled on his own muses in Dianne Keaton and Mia Farrow. Farrow in this picture, captured completely in black and white, even gives a striking visual approximation of Liv Ullmann in Persona. I’m not sure, but it seems too close not to be an obvious nod, albeit with a typical Allen twist. The added punchline is that Farrow’s character ultimately falls for her highly neurotic patient. It’s of little surprise.

Like many of the New York-based auteur’s work, Zelig doesn’t leave me with any nuggets I want to hold onto. Conceptually, it’s somewhat arresting and the execution is phenomenal. I can understand with all the credits to his name why Gordon Willis might have considered this to be one of the most difficult he ever undertook.

If I were the director of photography, I would want to pull my hair out too. But his work and attention to authenticity is probably the greatest takeaway from Zelig. Modern films pale in comparison when it comes to mimicking the past. There’s little to no contest. If nothing else, Zelig stands as the crown jewel of Classical Hollywood mimesis.

3.5/5 Stars

Note from September 2018: I did not address the allegations to Allen in this review, but I must acknowledge they now linger over any film of his we watch, especially those seen in retrospect. It’s a topic I do not know enough about, and I do not feel privy to the conversation, so I will leave it to others at the moment.

The Parallax View (1974)

Posted on September 18, 2014 by 4 Star Films

“Fella you don’t know what this story means”

The first shot and we know where we are. We’ve been here before. It’s Seattle. The occasion is a Fourth of July parade honoring Senator Charles Carol. Any viewer paying attention knows something fishy is afoot and in perhaps the most intense moment of the whole film the man is violently assassinated. A committee deliberates and comes to the conclusion that the perpetrator was acting alone. And so begins The Parallax View.

Second rate journalist Joseph Frady is known for getting into trouble or causing it most of the time. So when he is interested in rehashing the old story his long-suffering supervisor is skeptical (Hume Cronyn). It all starts because news reporter Lee Carter comes to Frady fearful for her life. It turns out that 6 of the people who were there during the assassination have all died one by one. It’s all very circumstantial and seemingly harmless enough. Soon Carter herself is dead due to barbiturates and alcohol. Frady heads first to the town of Salmon Tale (in search of the elusive Austin Tucker), where he runs into trouble with the local authorities and stumbles upon the Parallax Corporation. He gets his rendezvous with Tucker who is also fearful for his life. Minutes later Kabooom.

He continues winding up with more questions than answers as new bits and pieces crop up. It turns out Parallax is in the very lucrative business of recruiting assassins, so he goes off the grid to join them. His training includes a montage of images to condition him, and the audience is submitted to the process as well. Frady diverts a bomb threat thanks to a stack of napkins, but still another one bites the dust. He finally finds his way to a convention hall where a big to do is in the works for a senator. In a perfect bookend, another man is shot and after deliberating the committee concludes Joseph Frady acted alone. The biggest conspiracy in the country gets away with murder again and slinks back in the shadows.

Gordon Willis’s cinematography exhibits beautiful wide and long shots framing his subjects in their environments. Beatty is fit to play the somewhat rogue reporter but very few of the other characters are memorable. Perhaps that’s precisely the point. The film has extremely deliberate pacing (ie. Two men ride up an elevator one after another in no immediate hurry). However, the paranoia elevates as the film progresses, because we have little idea what is going on, we just know that something is going on. I am partial to The Manchurian Candidate, but here is a film that represents the 1970s, a decade still fraught with political unrest and a myriad of recent assassination attempts.

3.5/5 Stars

Annie Hall (1977)

Posted on September 6, 2014 by 4 Star Films

“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member. That’s the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.”

So begins Annie Hall a film that Woody Allen, also known as Alvy Singer, begins with an opening monologue borrowing a quip from Groucho Marx. It acts as a lead into his life story, romantic and otherwise.

He had a childhood characterized as being morose, depressed, and so on, because as he noted early on “the universe is expanding.” He grew up living under a roller coaster and having fun with the local bumper cars. He grew up to be a comic with the same despondent outlook on life. In one memorable long shot of a sidewalk, we listen to Alvy talking to his friend about people making jokes about him being a Jew and his assertions seem uncalled for.

When Alvy was dating Annie, they went to Ingmar Bergman films and The Sorrow and the Pity was a personal favorite of Alvy. A favorite film with a perfect title and subject for the pessimistic fellow. However, what really vexes him are puffed up know-it-alls who pontificate on and on like they are God’s gift to the universe. It seems necessary at this point to break the fourth wall.

As Alvy recalls his early childhood and first relationship which began at an Adlai Stevenson rally, it is rather funny that he remains unchanged the whole time. Physically Woody Allen is playing Alvy as a young man and an old man without any change.

Then there is the fiasco with the lobsters and the memories of his first meeting with Annie over tennis. That was when he met the girl who came out of the Norman Rockwell painting. Seemingly the antithesis of Alvy himself.

Their relationship is examined with all its quirks from a trivial conversation about art, with underlying subtitles that reflect their real thoughts, to Annie’s stint as a nightclub singer. They have a comical time people watching, and Alvy recalls his second wife and the one who was a Rolling Stone reporter. His relationship with Annie also has its share of arguments, over spiders at 3 in the morning and adult education. Through it all Alvy still views Annie as a cartoon version of the Wicked Queen from “Snow White,” who he secretly loves.

It is during a famous split screen sequence (actually a split room) where the stark differences, not only between the pair, but the genders are pointed out. Things are changing. They take a trip out to sunny California and Alvy cannot help but hate it compared to pleasantly gray New York. They have laugh tracks, wheat germ killers, and trash which is subsequently made into T.V. shows. Annie loves it all.

The inevitable comes and Annie breaks up only to have Alvy soon revisit California to propose marriage. Needless to say, it does not happen. He returns to New York and makes his first play about their last conversation verbatim, with one small revision. Alvy sees Annie one last time when she returns to New York, and they share some laughs while highlights role across the screen.

Allen’s stand-in Alvy sums it all up with one final joke about a guy who has a brother who thinks he a chicken, but he fails to do anything about it because he needs the eggs. That’s how he feels about relationships. “They’re totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd,” but you keep on because you need the eggs. Another philosophical gem from Alvy Singer.

The irony of Annie Hall is that many a person has gone on to pontificate on and on about it, but if we actually pulled an Alvy Singer and dragged Woody Allen from out behind a movie poster, I’m sure he could set us straight. Annie Hall is chock full of humor, a far from typical type of romance, and people trying to find their way in life. Take away discussion about psychoanalysis, modernism, antisemitism, and what you are left with are people just talking. Some of what they say is about such philosophical topics, but sometimes it’s not. It’s about memories, simple observations of life, and the little things that happen along the way.

There are clashing worldviews that come up against each other like New York and California (brought to us by the cinematography of Gordon Willis). There are different sorts of people like Alvy Singer and Annie Hall. Yet we still go through relationships “because we need the eggs” so to speak. We are searching for that type of intimacy and closeness, and very often we keep looking and looking. It is painful, seemingly necessary, and all the same, it can feel pointless. It’s part of being human I suppose.

Annie Hall works for me because of the quirks that give a fresh face to the typical romantic comedy and it will be the measuring stick for other such films that are being released for years to come. I am not usually a major fan of Woody Allen films, but this one is his undisputed masterpiece. It exemplifies his general philosophy and approach to comedy. Not to mention his typical players in Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts.

4.5/5 Stars