Celebrity (1998)
Film Overview
After the end of their marriage, a New York journalist and his former wife move in opposite directions through a culture increasingly obsessed with fame, image and the possibility of becoming somebody other people recognise.
Kenneth Branagh plays Lee Simon, a journalist whose divorce from Robin coincides with his attempt to reinvent himself as a serious writer. His work gives him access to actors, models, filmmakers and other people orbiting the machinery of celebrity.
Judy Davis plays Robin, initially far less confident than Lee about beginning again. Yet while Lee repeatedly mistakes proximity to famous people for progress, Robin gradually finds an unexpected place within television and becomes considerably more successful than either of them might have predicted.
Lee’s encounters include movie star Nicole Oliver, played by Melanie Griffith, volatile young actor Brandon Darrow, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, an unnamed supermodel played by Charlize Theron, actress Nola played by Winona Ryder and editor Bonnie, played by Famke Janssen.
Joe Mantegna appears as television producer Tony Gardella, whose relationship with Robin helps pull her towards a public world she had previously approached with anxiety rather than ambition.
Sven Nykvist photographs the film in stark black and white, returning Allen to monochrome for a story in which almost everybody is thinking about how they appear to other people. The film opened the 1998 New York Film Festival.
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My Review
Everyone wants to be seen
Celebrity may be one of Woody Allen’s most cynical films, but its cynicism is aimed at something very specific: the belief that being noticed can solve the problem of not knowing what to do with your life.
Lee Simon begins the film already dissatisfied. His marriage is over, his journalistic career feels insufficient and the serious writing he imagines will finally establish his importance remains somewhere ahead of him. Celebrity therefore becomes both subject matter and possible rescue.
Kenneth Branagh plays Lee as somebody permanently leaning towards the next opportunity. A film star, a model, an actor, a producer or an actress might lead to the interview, relationship, screenplay or introduction that finally changes everything.
The problem is that Lee is always arriving somewhere without really leaving the previous dissatisfaction behind. Access increases. Happiness does not.
Lee keeps getting closer to famous people and further from any clear idea of what he actually wants.
Melanie Griffith’s Nicole Oliver establishes the tone beautifully. Lee encounters a movie star at work, surrounded by all the machinery required to manufacture the image audiences eventually see. He is supposed to be observing this world professionally and immediately becomes emotionally entangled in it.
That pattern repeats throughout the film. Lee rarely encounters celebrity from a safe journalistic distance. He wants entry. Meeting somebody important becomes valuable partly because their importance might somehow rub off on him.
Charlize Theron’s supermodel takes that longing to a comic extreme. Lee is overwhelmed by physical beauty and behaves as though the universe itself has temporarily justified its existence. The encounter becomes another example of how quickly sophisticated language collapses when confronted by desire.
Fame and beauty operate similarly for Lee. Both promise meaning simply through proximity.
Celebrity gives Lee the feeling that something important is happening. He repeatedly mistakes that feeling for an important life.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Brandon Darrow is the film’s most explosive embodiment of celebrity culture. He is young, rich, famous and surrounded by people whose employment depends on tolerating whatever he decides to do next.
The performance arrived immediately after Titanic, which gives the casting an additional charge, but the scene works without any outside knowledge. Brandon possesses the confidence of somebody whose appetites have stopped encountering meaningful resistance.
His hotel-room behaviour is chaotic, selfish and strangely protected. Lee needs something from him, which means even outrageous conduct has to be negotiated around rather than simply rejected.
That is one of the film’s sharpest observations. Celebrity is not only something the famous person possesses. It is a system created by everybody who needs access to that person.
Brandon’s power comes partly from fame and partly from the number of people who have decided fame makes his behaviour worth enduring.
Winona Ryder’s Nola presents Lee with another possibility. She is not already an enormous star when he meets her; she is an actress trying to move forward, which makes her ambitions closer to his own.
Their relationship should therefore be more equal than Lee’s encounters with established celebrities. Instead the same insecurity returns. He wants intimacy, but he also wants the next opportunity. Nola wants somebody decisive while Lee is almost permanently distracted by the possibility that something better is about to enter the room.
Famke Janssen’s Bonnie sees the problem particularly clearly. She can offer Lee intelligence, affection and a degree of stability, but he is attracted to instability because instability keeps open the fantasy that his life is still about to become extraordinary.
Settling down would require him to accept that the future might consist of living rather than becoming.
Lee is terrified of missing the next opportunity, which means he repeatedly misses the life already standing in front of him.
Judy Davis gives the film its more interesting transformation. Robin begins from a position of fear. Divorce has removed the structure around her life and she does not respond with Lee’s frantic confidence. Social situations frighten her and the public world Lee finds exciting feels intimidating.
Yet Robin changes precisely because she is not chasing celebrity in the same way. Opportunities begin arriving through Tony Gardella, and she discovers an ability to communicate with people on television that she did not know she possessed.
Davis makes the transformation comic without making it magical. Robin remains recognisably the same anxious person, but experience gradually produces confidence. She does not wake up one morning as a completely different woman.
The great irony is that Robin achieves something Lee desperately wants: recognition. She does it almost as a consequence of building a new life rather than as the life’s sole objective.
Lee pursues fame and remains dissatisfied. Robin builds a life and fame arrives as one of its consequences.
Sven Nykvist’s black-and-white photography is an inspired choice. Celebrity culture normally suggests colour, glamour, magazines and excess. Allen and Nykvist remove colour completely.
The result is both elegant and severe. Manhattan parties, restaurants, premieres, apartments and fashion environments become part of the same monochrome world. The visual glamour remains, but it is stripped of one of its most obvious seductions.
Nykvist had already photographed Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors and the Oedipus Wrecks segment of New York Stories. Here his restraint suits a film packed with people trying very hard to create an image.
Faces become especially important. Celebrity may depend on spectacle, but the camera is often close enough to show anxiety surviving behind the spectacle.
The music adds an older form of glamour. You Oughta Be in Pictures is almost too perfect for the subject, while Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan supply much of the jazz and popular music.
The soundtrack is full of songs written decades before the late-1990s celebrity machinery on screen. That contrast suggests the desire for fame is hardly new even if the mechanisms for manufacturing it keep changing.
Billie Holiday’s Did I Remember (To Tell You I Adore You) gives the film an emotional delicacy often absent from Lee’s frantic romantic life. Teddy Wilson’s I Got Rhythm and the Brubeck Quartet’s Tangerine provide the relaxed sophistication Allen has always liked to place around Manhattan.
The music sounds secure. The people rarely are.
The soundtrack belongs to performers who became enduringly famous by making something. Lee is surrounded by people obsessed with becoming famous first.
The film’s New York locations strengthen the satire because the city repeatedly becomes a marketplace for identity. Restaurants, parties, luxury apartments, Central Park and fashion spaces are all places where somebody might encounter the person who changes their trajectory.
Lee moves through the city as though opportunity might be hiding at the next table. Robin eventually moves through many of the same spaces with considerably greater comfort.
Barbetta, Central Park, the East Side and the area around Central Park West all become part of a Manhattan where visibility functions almost like currency. If enough people know who you are, the assumption is that you must have become somebody.
Allen spends the film questioning whether those two ideas have anything to do with one another.
The famous image of the word HELP written across the sky becomes the perfect emblem for the whole film. At first it belongs to the artificial world of filmmaking, another image created for an audience.
By the end it feels like a summary of almost everybody we have watched. Lee wants help becoming important. Robin initially wants help surviving without him. Actors want careers, writers want access, models want attention and producers want the next successful project.
Everybody appears to have arrived somewhere desirable while privately worrying that it is not enough.
That is what makes Celebrity harsher than many Allen films. Success does not necessarily expose the emptiness underneath failure. It may simply give the emptiness a better table at the restaurant.
The word HELP hanging over Manhattan is the film’s bluntest joke and probably its most accurate description of everyone underneath it.
I do not think every strand works equally well, and the film can feel deliberately exhausting. That may be partly the point. Lee’s existence is built from constantly entering rooms in which somebody more important has just arrived.
Branagh’s performance is mannered by design, while Davis offers the more grounded emotional journey. DiCaprio’s brief appearance has extraordinary energy and the enormous supporting cast creates exactly the sense of a city permanently crowded with possible stories.
What stays with me is the contrast between the former spouses. Lee wants to become a writer whose presence matters and keeps getting distracted by people whose presence already matters publicly. Robin gradually becomes visible almost despite herself.
Fame changes their circumstances. It does not answer the more difficult question of what either person is supposed to do once somebody is looking.
Cast and Characters
Kenneth Branagh
A journalist and aspiring writer who moves from one celebrity encounter to another while trying to reinvent himself after divorce.
Judy Davis
Lee’s former wife, initially intimidated by life after marriage before unexpectedly developing a successful public career of her own.
Leonardo DiCaprio
A hugely successful young actor whose wealth and fame have created a world in which almost nobody is willing to tell him no.
Melanie Griffith
A movie star Lee encounters through his journalism, drawing him even further into the seductive world surrounding celebrity.
Winona Ryder
A young actress whose relationship with Lee exposes his inability to stop looking towards whatever opportunity might appear next.
Joe Mantegna
A television producer whose relationship with Robin helps her discover confidence and a professional life very different from the one she expected.
Old Hollywood and jazz surround a modern obsession with fame
Vintage popular music creates an elegant counterpoint to the frantic contemporary world of premieres, actors, models, journalists and people desperate to be recognised.
You Oughta Be in Pictures
Little Jack Little’s performance gives the film an almost irresistibly appropriate musical statement. The old song’s invitation to appear on screen becomes considerably more ironic inside a story where being seen has become an obsession in its own right.
The glamour comes from an earlier age
Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Erroll Garner, Jackie Gleason and Carmen Cavallaro appear across the soundtrack.
The film also uses Beethoven alongside popular songs, reflecting a world where high culture, commercial entertainment and celebrity are permanently colliding.
Did I Remember
Holiday’s recording of the Walter Donaldson and Harold Adamson song supplies a tenderness largely missing from Lee’s restless approach to romance.
Tangerine
The Brubeck Quartet adds sophisticated jazz to the Manhattan social world through which Lee and Robin move in very different directions.
I Got Rhythm
George and Ira Gershwin’s standard becomes another link between contemporary celebrity culture and the older New York musical world Allen repeatedly returns to.
Lullaby of Birdland
Garner’s performance adds effortless musical confidence to a film filled with people whose social confidence is far more fragile.
Locations
Celebrity moves through restaurants, apartments, parks and fashionable Manhattan spaces where being in the right room can seem almost as important as what anybody actually does there.
Barbetta
The historic Theatre District restaurant is one of the real Manhattan locations used for the film’s social and romantic encounters.
Central Park
Central Park appears within the film’s wider portrait of an affluent, highly visible New York moving constantly between private and public life.
The Cherokee
The distinctive East 77th Street apartment complex was used for exterior filming.
1 Central Park West
The building and its Jean-Georges setting contribute to the polished social world surrounding the film’s celebrity culture.
Nyack
Production also moved outside Manhattan to Nyack, extending the film’s New York geography beyond the celebrity-centred city spaces.
Manhattan as a Stage
The locations repeatedly function as places to be seen: restaurants, premieres and fashionable spaces where identity is almost always being performed for somebody else.
Awards and Recognition
Opening Night Film
Celebrity opened the 36th New York Film Festival on 25 September 1998.
Sven Nykvist
Nykvist’s black-and-white photography gives the celebrity world a severe elegance very different from the glossy colour normally associated with fame.
Artios Award Nomination
Juliet Taylor received a Casting Society of America nomination for casting the film’s enormous comic ensemble.
Judy Davis Recognition
Davis received Best Supporting Actress recognition from the Santa Fe Film Critics Circle for her performance as Robin.
A Culture Full of Famous Faces
Leonardo DiCaprio, Winona Ryder, Melanie Griffith, Charlize Theron, Famke Janssen and Joe Mantegna are among the actors populating the film’s satire of visibility and fame.
Fame Without Satisfaction
The film remains one of Allen’s bleakest examinations of the difference between becoming visible and becoming happy.