Word: robin
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...affectlessness, we have plenty of time to observe just how profoundly he has misconceived Death. As anyone whose house he has visited can tell you, he's a vicious, merciless anarchist. Maybe Max von Sydow is now all wrong for the part. And we can certainly be glad Robin Williams didn't get it. But there is Jim Carrey, who is right for the role and can open bad pictures...
...Robin Simon (Judy Davis) is Lee's estranged wife, a former teacher of Chaucer and a quivering mass of neuroses, willing to try anything--religious retreats, plastic surgery--to get her postdivorce life back together...
...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...
...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 her. And grant her stardom...