What really works about Woody Allen’s “Zelig” and makes it brilliant is that no matter how outlandish, ludicrous and fantastical Leonard Zelig’s scandal or condition gets, you still kind of buy it. Allen’s got Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow giving plausible sounding and descriptive diagnoses of Zelig’s mental state, all of it following a sense of empathy and dramatic arc, and it’s all total nonsense.
“Zelig” is Woody Allen’s mockumentary, although to call it that conjures up ideas of “This is Spinal Tap” and “Best In Show” in which the subject being mocked is someone other than the director himself. “Zelig” is more accurately a real documentary on a fake person, and not just that, but a proto-Woody Allen, a version of himself we see in many of his films. It uses Leonard Zelig’s condition as a human chameleon to get inside the mind of a person always begging to fit in and be liked, even going as far as to say there’s really not much wrong with that. Changing our personality and even our appearance is something just about anyone does, and the movie acknowledges that this could be anything from lying about having read “Moby Dick” to pretending you’re an experienced psychologist so you can go to bed with your doctor.
Leonard Zelig (Allen in the fake documentary footage and inserted into real newsreels) is painted in this mockumentary as a hugely famous yet forgotten public figure in the 1920s Jazz Age of New York, hobnobbing with Hollywood starlets, politicians and Popes, even escaping the Nazis along the way. The documentary explains that Zelig had a condition in which whenever he appeared with a group of people, he assumed their physical and personal qualities. He could blend in as an elderly Chinese man, a black trumpet player or an overweight man with no personality of his own.
Doctors studied him with hilarious results, the press got wind of him and old relatives came out of the woodwork to make him into a circus sideshow. They called him The Human Chameleon. Dances and songs were named after him. Celebrities wanted to meet him. And only Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) truly had the drive to try and cure him.
Of course this is all a farce, and “Zelig” is only believable in the sense that Allen fully sells this one joke. No detail has been spared on the film’s look, sound or tone. The hazy newsreel and audio footage seems painstakingly cobbled together, the talking head testimonials feel straight out of a ’70s “60 Minutes” piece (the film was made in the early ’80s, so even these feel not quite contemporary but Allen playing with the period setting to lampoon the genre), and the riffs on everything from Nazi war footage to bad Old Hollywood movies is impeccable.
And this a Woody Allen joint. He does very little talking in “Zelig” but gets in a few good one liners anyway (“I worked with Dr. Frued on the concept of penis envy. He felt it should restricted to women.” “A rabbi told me the meaning of life, but he told it to me in Hebrew, and then he tried to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.”) Those who have seen his films are wise to his joke immediately, and this somewhat anomaly of a feature for him is proof of just how important of an auteur Allen was in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Allen’s influence extends into many realms, but there’s only a few instances where a word like “Zelig” can make it into the cultural lexicon: “A person who learns everything they can about a specific subject in order to fit in with a specific group of people.” Allen’s replication of a documentary is just about as good of a zelig as you can get.