There's an unforgettable shot near the end of Broadway Danny Rose (1984, Woody Allen) (second viewing, first on the big screen) that deftly plays upon how sympathetic the title character--a talent agent stuck on the lower rungs of New York's show-business ladder and played by Allen himself--has become to the audience over the course of the 70-odd preceding minutes. The shot begins wide, with the camera perched from a distance as Danny Rose, lounge singer Lou (Nick Apollo Forte), and Lou's mistress Tina (Mia Farrow) exit a hotel's ballroom chatting. As the trio walks down the hall and closer towards the camera, Lou and Tina begin turning a corner and edging out of the frame, gradually leaving Danny by himself. And just as Lou lays a bombshell of bad news upon Danny--bam!--Allen's shocked face dominates the frame in close-up.
This shot is indicative of the unfussy yet impressively rigorous visual design of Allen and director of photography Gordon Willis (working in gorgeous black-&-white, as he did on Allen's Manhattan); this is certainly one of the best-looking of Allen's '80s films.
Yet the shot's shift in visual emphasis would mean nothing without the brilliantly conceived character it ends up highlighting in its final few seconds. The plot of Broadway Danny Rose is a riff on the "pushover mensch learns to fight for what he wants after falling for his boss' mistress" storyline Billy Wilder offered up in The Apartment, but Allen, never one to lazily regurgitate his influences, makes Danny Rose and Farrow's Tina Vitale original creations in their own right. Arguably America's wittiest screenwriter, Allen gives Danny hilariously obsequious patter to soothe his clients' nerves ("I don't mean to sound didactic or facetious here," is how he repeatedly softens criticism), and, as an actor, he's wonderfully ingratiating in the role. Farrow, his onscreen equal, clearly relishes the chance to play Tina's brassy, tacky surface personality, but is just as adept at plumbing the guilt-ridden melancholy that plagues Tina in the film's final reel.
It would be criminal to spoil Danny and Tina's ultimate fate, but it's giving away nothing to say that it is spelled out via--you guessed it--one mobile, very pretty, and economically expressive shot. Grade: A-
Being a ginormous fan of Allen's, I had been reluctant to revisit Zelig (1983, Woody Allen) (second-ish viewing, first on the big screen), the only film of his I had previously chosen to stop watching mid-film. A mockumentary about Leonard Zelig, a media-trumpeted "human chameleon" who can alter his appearance to resemble whoever he happens to be conversing with at any given time, Zelig struck me on first (only half-completed) viewing as a one-joke comedy so intent on running its single gag into the ground that even the resonant subtextual notion that every one of us wishes we could fit in socially all the time couldn't keep me watching. The "hey, look, Zelig's in blackface among black jazz musicians now" tomfoolery just got friggin' old after a while.
Now that I've seen the film in its entirety, I'll happily concede that it's a formally one-of-a-kind and satirically sharp comedy. But to me, Zelig is still far from being one of Allen's best films; it's just a damned interesting one.
The mockumentary form Allen adheres to is both a strength and a liability, as it turns out. There's no denying Allen's great skill in using still photography, talking-head interviews, and cleverly doctored archival footage (at one point, we see Zelig trying to get somebody's attention while standing behind a bellowing Adolf Hitler) to tell a fictional story in an unconventional way. But the form keeps the viewer at an emotional distance (the film's ending, intended to be extremely moving, provoked nothing more than me thinking "aww, that's kinda sweet" to myself), and both the inescapably gimmicky nature of it and the brisk pace it requires make the movie feel, exhaustingly, a full 40 minutes longer than its brief 79 minutes.
Luckily, though, my snap assessment of Zelig as a one-joke affair proved to be inaccurate. Once the title character is cured of his peculiar ailment by Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow), the rest of the movie explores the satisfaction of staying true to yourself (one of the biggest laughs comes when Zelig has his first disagreement with somebody, over the trifling matter of the day's weather), and, with biting wit and insight, the way the public can turn against a media sensation it enshrined only 15 minutes ago. So Leonard Zelig can be seen, via just one of many allegorical interpretations, as a precursor to the built-up-then-torn-down likes of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. And who says Woody Allen isn't versatile? Grade: B
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