‘Zelig’: Woody Allen as No One and Everyone
Released 40 years ago, the writer-director’s film blends archival footage from the 1920s with new material filmed to look like old newsreels to construct a mockumentary about conformity that speaks to our time.
Mia Farrow and Woody Allen in ‘Zelig’ PHOTO: ORION/WARNER BROS/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
For most of his career, Woody Allen has been consistently associated with a certain species of romantic comedy. In such widely popular films as “Annie Hall” and “Hannah and Her Sisters,” Mr. Allen offered comic sketches of the amorous affairs of late-20th-century Manhattanites. Each relied on what came to be viewed as a formula: verbal banter, cultural erudition, visual elegance and, of course, the filmmaker’s own on-screen persona of a talkative worrywart.
Yet the 87-year-old writer-director’s career is lined with surprising detours. He has directed in the tradition of German Expressionism (“Shadows and Fog”), Anton Chekhov (“September”) and American musical comedy (“Everyone Says I Love You”); two of his best films, “Match Point” and “Cassandra’s Dream,” are murder stories.
Undoubtedly Mr. Allen’s boldest, most unexpected achievement is his 1983 film “Zelig.” The fictional, documentary-style film purports to recount the enigmatic life of a figure from the Jazz Age, Leonard Zelig. Played by an especially meek and shrinking Mr. Allen, Zelig possesses an instinct for conformity so profound that he proves capable of both maneuvering himself into unlikely settings and undergoing physical metamorphoses to suit each occasion. Depending on who is standing beside him, Zelig adopts guises ranging from doctor to gangster to aristocrat. Ironically, the character’s cipher-like quality results in widespread renown.
The premise is beyond fantastic; one sequence depicts Zelig, in an act of psychosomatic conformity, swelling to a great weight while in the proximity of two obese men. Nonetheless, Mr. Allen saw the story as a chance to make serious points about the risk that social pressures pose to individuality—“the specific danger of abandoning one’s own true self, in an effort to be liked, not to make trouble, to fit in,” as the filmmaker explained to interviewer Stig Björkman in the book “Woody Allen on Woody Allen.”
Perhaps to underscore the seriousness of his intentions, Mr. Allen decided against presenting the story of the so-called human chameleon in traditional dramatic scenes. Instead, the filmmaker adopted a documentary format in which a solemn narrator (the voice of Patrick Horgan) guides the viewer through archival footage of cityscapes, nightclub life and dancing flappers, all of which effortlessly kindles the atmosphere of the Jazz Age.
Then, with cinematographer Gordon Willis, Mr. Allen shot footage of himself and other actors—including Mia Farrow as Zelig’s psychiatrist, confidante and eventual lover, Eudora Fletcher—in the same shaky and grainy manner of the old footage.
Film editor Susan E. Morse gracefully stitched together old and new material to create a latticework of real and simulated newsreel-style footage, photographs and ’20s-era music. Ms. Morse also judiciously placed Mr. Allen within extant footage so that the character of Zelig could occasionally appear to share the same frame as various notables, including Babe Ruth.
Adding to the film’s patina of reality, Mr. Allen filmed interviews with public intellectuals who soberly ruminate on Zelig’s significance, including Saul Bellow, Irving Howe and Susan Sontag. “He was the phenomenon of the ’20s,” Ms. Sontag says in a spot-on send-up of breathless talking-head commentaries. “When you think that, at that time, he was as well-known as Lindbergh, it’s really quite astonishing.” Mr. Allen’s astonishingly accurate simulacrum of a documentary will be recognized by anyone who has ever watched such programming on public television.
What this adds up to is far more than a mere technical feat (though it is that—Willis was nominated for an Oscar for his cinematography). Through its elaborate bricolage, the film offers a profound commentary on an individual reacting to the expectations, orthodoxies and subtly coercive forces of modern society. Although Zelig internalized these pressures to an extreme, absurd degree, each of us can identify with the source of his anxiety: the wanting to belong, the desire to say the right thing, the succor that can come from being among a crowd and the wish to bask in the reflected glory of celebrity. Even the film’s faux-documentary style reflects Zelig’s true nature; because we perceive the character as a distant figure glimpsed in purportedly old clips and fuzzy stills, he comes across not so much as a fully rounded human being than as a nonentity among the horde—which is exactly what he is.
“It’s safe to be like the others,” Zelig admits under hypnosis during one of his sessions with Dr. Fletcher. He also reveals the origins of his compulsion to emulate others to be rather ordinary: He suggests that his entire shape-shifting condition springs from the shame he once felt for being the only person in a group not to have read “Moby-Dick.” How many of us might be tempted to dissimulate when it would mean appearing smarter, more literate or more cosmopolitan?
Forty years after its release, “Zelig” increasingly looks less like a re-creation of a past time than a parable for the present, when the pressure to swim with the tide is more keenly felt than ever.