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. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Zelig”