Zelig

Leonard Zelig is described as a cipher, "the ultimate conformist".  He defies science with his ability to absorb the physical and mental characteristics of anyone with whom he comes in contact.  He can be around those of different races and assume their skin color.  Speak different languages.  Grow a pot belly.  Switch political affiliations.  He parties with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charlie Chaplin.  This makes him popular in all social strata, though sometimes he's ejected, like from the Pope's entourage or the lineup of a professional baseball team at spring training.  Zelig by himself is a shadow, a man who stares into space as he has no personality of his own.

Physicians are baffled.  But then Dr. Eudora Fletcher takes great interest in Zelig, eventually learning of his troubled family history, his intense desire for acceptance, which causes these metamorpheses that have led him to be compared to a lizard.  A human chameleon.  Dr. Fletcher does cure him, but Zelig's past will catch up with him, perhaps even leading him (a Jew) to fall in with Adolph Hitler and his army!

1983's ZELIG is an endlessly clever, at times brilliant pseudo documentary that goes to considerable lengths to look and sound like a newsreel from the 1920s.  Director/writer/star Woody Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis utilize period cameras and lenses and later stomped on and crunched the celluloid to give the movie a vintage appearance.  Allen and co-star Mia Farrow (in her first collaboration with her future real-life partner of thirteen odd years) appear in scenes that are expertly woven with old clips.  Even today it is an impressive feat.   It certainly looks better than some of the awkward technique used in FORREST GUMP.

The movie is also very funny, far more so than I was expecting.  ZELIG always gave off a more serious, or at least straight faced vibe in its advertising.  Allen is in a similar comedic vein here with early comedies like BANANAS and SLEEPER, with many high and lowbrow jokes and lines.  Some choice political zingers. There's even a joke about masturbation.

I especially enjoyed the breakaways to famous intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, who offer they analyses on the mysterious Zelig.