Zelig
First screened and reviewed in August 1998 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2025
Director: Woody Allen. Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan, Ellen Garrison, John Rothman, Sol Lomita, Mary Louise Wilson, Richard Litt, John Buckwalter, Garrett Brown, Marianne Tatum, Michael Kell, Deborah Rush, Stephanie Farrow, Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Bruno Bettelheim, John Morton Blum, Bricktop. Screenplay: Woody Allen.

 In Brief: Conceptually rewarding that Zelig, like its hero, is so cleverly made and diversely interpretable. But how satisfying is it?

VOR: ④  Faux-documentary wasn't done to death in 1983. Still less were Where's Waldo? stunts. Willis's rendering of those amazes.


   
Photo © 1983 Orion Pictures
Let's say the three things you or I or Woody Allen or Leonard Zelig or whoever might seek most often in a movie are creativity, technique, and entertainment value.

Zelig, the story of an early-20th-century nebbish who by temperament or talent or malady couldn't help turning into whomever was nearest by, is certainly creative. Both a welcome break from an especially imitative mini-stretch in Allen's career (Interiors, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, with Manhattan the pronounced exception) but also a direct comment upon that tendency, Zelig has a fertile and flexible premise, at once farcical and philosophical and self-reflexive. Like Groundhog Day, it's a comedy with such a distinctive gimmick, much imitated since but totally new at the time, that its title remains cultural shorthand. For a director who would later indulge in blatant self-repetition and/or pull rightly discarded drafts out of desk drawers and say, "Hey, good enough," it's exciting to see this level of impish imagination at work, scene by scene and across the whole.

It's equally exciting that Zelig's premise invited as much stylistic challenge as high-wire storytelling. The script of Zelig didn't necessarily require such playfully painstaking recreations of hand-cranked visuals, silent-movie tempos, and newsreel parlance; whether by changing fortunes or sagging initiative, later Allen would likely not have bothered. The then-wizardly insertions of Allen's chameleonic alter ego into extant historical footage are fun, but the ambient recreation of bygone epochs in life and on screen are even more so, led by the all-star team of production designer Mel Bourne, costumer Santo Loquasto, and especially cinematographer Gordon Willis (who famously and belatedly reaped his first Oscar nomination here). I'd forgotten the interpolated scenes from a fake big-studio melodrama based on Zelig's already fake life, and they too are a kick in the pants. And lest we skimp on the sonic pastiche, Dick Hyman's sextet of faux-30s, Zelig-inspired ditties are a whole bracelet of charms.

Is Zelig entertaining, though? An "eye of the beholder" question, but I admit to wishing this approximation of newsreels and old serials stretched the mimicry further and allowed Zelig to be a half-hour short—maybe an appetizer course attached to the following year's Broadway Danny Rose, or held in clairvoyant abeyance to serve as Allen's contribution to New York Stories. The conceit of Zelig is always way out ahead of the actual action, which is bare-minimal when the movie is working best (Leonard standing somewhere it shouldn't be possible to be) or working worst (Allen in blackface, Allen in yellowface, Allen back in blackface) and then antically arbitrary when Allen attempts anything in the direction of plot. The latter temptation kicks in most in the final third, with a bizarre lovers' reunion at a Hitler rally and some aviation exploits. These swerves not only suggest some uncertainty about how to end the movie but a maybe-wayward sense that Zelig needed an "end" or a three-act arc, when it seems more natural as a standalone jape. As psychotherapist Dr. Eudora Fletcher, Mia Farrow is stranded between the Jape part of Zelig (onscreen often without much to do) and the Story part (married off to the lead character, in a simultaneous climax and afterthought).

Two out of three ain't at all bad in Zelig's case, especially since Allen still has some fresh verbal zingers, which usually work better in the deadpan of Patrick Horgan's never-glimpsed narrator than in Zelig's own occasional, somewhat incongruous interjections. A little too much of a strange, good, inventive thing is not worth lamenting, even if entertainment value is maybe my principal hope from an Allen movie, and one hopes to check one's watch less often during a 77-minute feature.

Once the movie does end, there's no shortage of interpretive frames to play around with. Is Zelig a spoof of Allen's helpless yen for imitating his starkly disparate idols? A complementary or even opposite satire of just how little he changes or is capable of change, despite his strong yearnings to do so? Is it a fantasy of being less known to his fans, or the kind of movie you only make, with yourself dead-center, when you're high on the world's adulation—including that of several luminaries in fiction and criticism, from Susan Sontag to Saul Bellow, who let their hair down eagerly to jump into your sandbox? Is Zelig the oddest, most vigorously executed one-off in Allen's portfolio or its most representative entry, blending the high-minded and the hokily comic registers of other phases, and mixing familiar elements of persecution complex, galloping libido gags, and many flavors of Jewish humor? You get to decide, at which point you're the best judge of whether you've just pulled a Zelig yourself—your response strikingly congruent to other thoughts you already had about Allen—or whether you've found a way to take this exercise on its own, unusual terms. Grade: B

P.S. After publishing, I re-read the review I wrote when I last saw Zelig, in 1998. Hilariously, that piece sometimes aligns totally with this one and at other times directly contravenes it. Are we the same person in our early 20s as in our late 40s? Are we our own equals and opposites, as A(llen) is to Z(elig)? You decide!

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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