Zelig
Director: Woody Allen. Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Ellen Garrison, Stephanie Farrow, Sol Lomita. Screenplay: Woody Allen.

The curse of filmmakers as consistently ingenious as Woody Allen is that when they make low-scale, easy charmers like Zelig, you can't help but wish they had gone a little further. In truth, Zelig, at a mere 79 minutes, probably exists at the precise length at which its laughs are still reliable but the central gimmick—that Leonard Zelig, played by Allen, was a now-forgotten media sensation of the 1920s and 1930s who popped up in a whole swath of landmark curtural events—does not yet wear thin. Zelig's seeming omnipresence in circumstances ranging from the Yankees' dugout (batting behind Gehrig) to affluent parties attended by the Fitzgeralds to, perhaps most memorably, a Nazi rally, is further complicated by what the fake-documentary perspective of the film names a "medical phenomenon," by which Zelig, "The Human Chameleon," begins to register physically the defining ethnic or outward characteristics of whomever he is closest to in a room. Thus we are also treated to scrumptious eye-candy ploys like Allen made up as a Chinese restuaranteur, or a scat trumpet-player in a Harlem nightclub, though the narrator comments that experiments between Zelig and women or animal companions yielded no similar effects. Perhaps Woody Allen in drag was too much for us to hope for; or, more likely, too much for us to stand.

In any event, this slender outing—the only other primary character is Mia Farrow's Dr. Eudora Fletcher, who is determined to prove that Zelig's condition is psychical, not morphological, and thus wins an audience with Freud and other "contemporaries"—is kept as nimbly and lively as one of Forrest Gump's champion ping-pong balls, especially since Allen's superimpositions of himself into archival footage are consistently wittier and less obvious than the scenarios in which Gumpmeister Robert Zemeckis placed his own picaresque. It also bears mentioning that none of Allen's gags, not even the climactic Hitler rally (which is uproarious), smacks of the kind of bad taste of Forrest Gump's cheeky appearance at George Wallace's one-man effort to keep the University of Alabama segregated. And the technical wizardry of Zelig extends far beyond the jerry-rigging required to make Zelig believably "historic"; the brilliant cinematographer Gordon Willis (he of the Godfather trilogy) finally and deservedly copped his first Oscar nomination for his uncanny simulation of silent-era flickery black and white film exposure. The photography alone makes Zelig a great treat to watch, as well as further proof that Allen's humor and pop accessibility, particularly in projects like this, belies an incredibly sophisticated craftsmanship in even the technical aspects of his films.

All of that said, Zelig, as most gimmick pictures are, is a relatively self-contained affair that dissipates rather quickly in the memory and certainly yields none of the breathtaking moments, comedic or otherwise, of a bona fide Allen triumph like Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, or Manhattan. There is barely a thing to be said against Zelig except that, much like Allen's equally gag-driven What's Up, Tiger Lily, the pleasures of its comedy are hampered by the fact that, while his other films are unimaginable coming from any other director, this film could have been conceived and delivered by more than a few other filmmakers if the premise had struck them first. It's as though Allen himself had the Chameleon Complex and he spent a couple of months around Mel Brooks. Zelig doesn't require or receive the unique touches of genius that Allen's more fleshed-out projects exhibit so often that, as I said earlier, his fans are spoiled when he is merely a good filmmaker, not a great one. Zelig is unimpeachable entertainment, and has infinitely more laughs than the rather monotonous Tiger Lily, but it's a good evening's fun that will most likely have been forgotten by morning. B

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Cinematography: Gordon Willis
Best Costume Design: Santo Loquasto

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
Best Actor (Musical/Comedy): Woody Allen

Other Awards:
New York Film Critics Circle: Best Cinematography
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