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. At the Opera House and Showcase Route 6.

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."

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."

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The name game

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