From the Trenches: Woody Allen's Celebrity

I saw a picture somewhere online of Kenneth Branagh, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sam Rockwell walking through a casino. I checked the caption, which said it was a still from Celebrity (1998), and I went directly to Netflix, added it to my queue, and bumped it right to the top. I've never been a Woody Allen fan, but I couldn't pass up a movie starring my #2 (Rockwell) and #3 (Branagh) favorite actors.

Well, I should have passed it up because I did not enjoy Celebrity at all. (Let's forget the fact that Rockwell had about 5 seconds of screen time and no lines - I really should have seen that coming.) Branagh took the Allen-substitute role, and it did him no favors. It actually was a pretty good impersonation - he had the timing, mannerisms and phrasing down - but the fact remains that the selfish neurotic is not a likable character. I don't know if the effort he put into the voice and movements took too much of his focus, but Branagh seemed to play up the negative aspects more than Allen himself used to, particularly the selfishness. Lee was unbearably self-centered, and for no good reason; he's not a great writer, he's not particularly good looking (at least among the models and matinee idols who populate the film) and he has no dazzling wit or charm in social situations. 

I'll be honest, though: I love unlikeable characters. Characters you love to hate are just more fun. To be an effective villain, to amass the kind of followers needed to take control, you need a huge amount of charisma, and that's what makes a performance fun. Branagh has played a wide range of egomaniacs - I'm thinking of Peter's Friends and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets off the top of my head - but I've always felt his underlying charm elevated the performance (and yes, for the record I do think he is very good looking). He just seemed joyless and directionless in this role. I felt like I wanted to shake some life into him.

I think the character here suffered from a lack of explanation - why did he bounce from woman to woman? Because he could? I don't buy it, but the movie was too stuffed to the gills with cameos and characters to really delve too deeply. The frenetic pace and frequent scene changes made it really hard to keep up; there were several times I wasn't sure if we had gone backward or forward in time and if so, how far, or even where it was set (New York is a good guess, right?). However, one great scene near the end showed Famke Janssen on a departing boat, throwing pages of Branagh's manuscript into the air; it switches to the reverse shot of him on the pier with pages floating around, then back to her getting farther and farther away. It was so simple and beautiful that it made me pause for a second and remember, "Oh right, Woody Allen is a director." And a good one, too. That quiet, poetic image was striking compared to the rest of the overly busy movie. 

I will say, for all the movie's many, many faults, I loved two performances in particular: Joe Mantegna and DiCaprio. Mantegna played a thankless straight-man role opposite Judy Davis, but he was ever the charmer and gave a stabilizing performance that the movie really needed. DiCaprio, on the other hand, made the most of his explosive short scene with a blistering fight opposite Gretchen Mol. Portraying the excesses of young Hollywood, he reminded me why we were all so excited about him 12 years ago. He was totally mesmerizing, and I wish the whole movie had been about him.