Word: allene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Allen traces Lee's and Robin's parallel courses toward opposite fates, Celebrity, even though it is shot in austere black and white on palpably real locations, turns into something new for him: an epic. It contains 242 speaking parts and 5,128 extras--forces sufficient, if deployed in a different context, to make a biblical spectacle. Or--better comparison--a screen version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair or some other satirical, multilayered saga of halfway decent, halfway desperate people trying to make their way in a corrupt society...
...pilgrim's path is made easier, Allen says, if he or she is armored by innocence rather than made vulnerable by naked need. It also helps if there is someone utterly indifferent to fame who can lend a guiding hand. It's Robin's good luck that such a figure interrupts her consultation with the cosmetic surgeon. He's a television producer named Tony Gardella (Joe Mantegna) doing a story on the currently hot doctor, and he thinks Robin looks fine just the way she is. And he thinks she might shake her funk if she comes to work...
Good idea. Like Allen himself, Tony brings clear vision but no reformist zeal to the business of chronicling celebrity life. It's just something he, like a dwindling few of his fellow citizens, is trying to live with (and in his case, make a living from) as rationally as possible. He guesses that Robin's self-consciousness, her sense that she doesn't belong in the same room with the rich and famous, will play well on TV. She's as addled as anyone in her audience would be in fast company, so of course viewers identify with...
...count on it. And don't count on Allen for much sympathy for Lee or anyone else caught up in this game. This is a coldly mocking film, alert to the fact that politicians under investigation are still welcome at celebrity golf tournaments; that famous authors, abetted by their editors, can steal unfamous authors' ideas with impunity; that skinheads, rabbis and lawyers from the A.C.L.U. can grouse together affably in the greenroom about who ate up all the bagels before going out to scream at one another on a TV talk show. These people all know that what they share...
What the elect don't know, but Allen insists on, is that the state of grace they enjoy is not secular sainthood. That is to say, it is generally unearned by good works and suffering. It is, at best, a capricious cosmic joke and therefore nothing to get puffed up about. "I've become the kind of woman I've always hated," Robin says wonderingly at the end of her journey, "but I'm happier." There's a moral buried inside that irony. Or maybe it's the nasty core truth of our times. Whatever it is, Celebrity...