Zelig (1983)
Film Overview
Woody Allen turns the story of a man desperate to fit in into one of the most technically inventive films of his career.
Zelig is presented almost entirely as a documentary about Leonard Zelig, an apparently forgotten celebrity of the 1920s and 1930s whose extraordinary ability allows him to physically transform into the people around him.
Among doctors he becomes a doctor. Among musicians he appears to change race. Surrounded by heavier people, he gains weight. In the company of rabbis he grows a beard and sidelocks. His condition earns him the nickname “the Human Chameleon” and briefly makes him one of the most famous people in America.
Psychiatrist Dr Eudora Fletcher, played by Mia Farrow, becomes fascinated by Zelig and gradually discovers that his transformations are rooted in a simple but overwhelming desire: he wants desperately to be liked and is terrified of being different.
Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis blend newly filmed material with genuine newsreels, photographs and archive footage, placing Zelig alongside historical figures including Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge, Charles Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler.
Real intellectuals and cultural figures including Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bricktop and Bruno Bettelheim appear as themselves, discussing Zelig as though he had genuinely existed.
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My Review
The man who becomes everybody except himself
Zelig is one of those Woody Allen films where the idea is so good that it would almost be enough on its own. A man wants to fit in so badly that he literally becomes whoever happens to be standing next to him.
But what makes the film much more than a clever premise is the seriousness with which Allen constructs the world around Leonard Zelig.
We are not simply told that this strange man once existed. We are given evidence. There are photographs, newsreels, medical films, newspaper reports, songs, interviews and eyewitnesses. Historians and intellectuals analyse him. Old footage appears to show him standing beside some of the most famous people of the twentieth century.
The joke depends on the film behaving as though none of this is a joke.
That is the first thing I love about Zelig. Allen never undermines the documentary form by constantly reminding us that we are watching a comedy. The presentation is meticulous enough that, for a few seconds at a time, an image can almost persuade you that Leonard Zelig really did exist.
And once the film has created that illusion, it can become increasingly absurd without losing its authority.
Zelig’s greatest joke is that the more impossible his story becomes, the more seriously the film documents it.
Leonard himself is a perfect Woody Allen creation because beneath the impossible condition is an extremely recognisable anxiety.
He wants people to like him.
That is all.
His extraordinary physical transformations are really an exaggerated version of something almost everybody does to some extent. We alter the way we speak depending on the company. We adopt interests because other people have them. We laugh at things because everyone else is laughing. We pretend to recognise a book, a film or a piece of music because admitting ignorance feels embarrassing.
Zelig simply takes that social instinct to a biological extreme.
The explanation he eventually gives under hypnosis is wonderfully simple. His trouble began when people were discussing Moby-Dick. Zelig had never read it, but he was too afraid to admit that.
It is funny because the origin of one of the strangest medical conditions imaginable is social embarrassment at a literary conversation.
But it is also exactly the right explanation.
Leonard’s fear is not really that people will discover he has never read Melville. His fear is that he will be exposed as somebody who does not belong.
That makes the film’s treatment of conformity much sharper than the surface comedy initially suggests.
Zelig has no secure identity because identity carries risk. If he becomes the person standing beside him, disagreement disappears.
He can never be rejected for being different because he has removed the difference before anybody has the chance.
Of course, the price is enormous.
Everybody can accept Leonard Zelig because there is eventually almost no Leonard Zelig left to accept.
Zelig solves the fear of not belonging by removing the person who might have failed to belong.
Woody Allen plays Leonard with unusual restraint.
There is very little of the expansive verbal comedy associated with many of his earlier characters. Leonard is passive, nervous and often barely present within his own story.
That makes perfect sense. A character whose defining quality is his ability to absorb the personality of everybody around him cannot possess too strong a personality himself.
Allen’s performance becomes funnier because the documentary keeps assigning enormous historical importance to somebody who looks as though he would prefer nobody to notice him.
Mia Farrow has the more active role.
Dr Eudora Fletcher initially approaches Leonard as a medical problem, but Farrow gradually makes the relationship warmer and more personal. She becomes the one person who seems interested in finding the man underneath the transformations rather than simply studying, exploiting or celebrating the phenomenon.
I think that is essential to the film.
Without Eudora, Zelig could remain a brilliant technical exercise and social satire. Their relationship gives it an emotional centre.
She wants Leonard to stop becoming everybody else, but she cannot simply order him to become himself because Leonard does not really know what that means.
The hypnosis scenes are some of my favourites.
Leonard begins adopting Eudora’s personality and professional authority, transforming into a psychiatrist who confidently disagrees with her analysis of his own condition.
The joke is perfect because therapy itself becomes another social situation into which he can disappear.
To cure him, Eudora somehow has to create an environment in which Leonard feels safe enough not to imitate the person trying to cure him.
Farrow plays these scenes with exactly the right combination of patience, curiosity and affection.
Eudora is the first person who becomes more interested in Leonard Zelig than in the Human Chameleon.
The technical achievement remains extraordinary.
We are now so accustomed to digitally inserting people into old images that it is easy to underestimate what Gordon Willis, Allen and the effects team achieved here.
Zelig appears at baseball games, political events and gatherings involving genuine historical figures. Newly filmed images have to sit beside archive footage created decades earlier with different cameras, film stocks, lenses and processing.
The important thing is that Allen does not want the new material to look cleaner than the old footage.
He wants it to look equally damaged.
That reverses the normal logic of film restoration. Instead of making old images look new, the production had to make new images look old.
Willis recreates changes in exposure, grain, scratches, flicker and contrast. Different sequences appear to come from different eras and different kinds of documentary equipment.
The result is not simply impressive technique. It is part of the comedy.
If the images looked obviously fabricated, the central joke would collapse. Their apparent authenticity allows increasingly outrageous claims to arrive with the visual authority of historical fact.
The contemporary interviews are just as important.
Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Bricktop and Bruno Bettelheim discuss Zelig with straight faces. They do not appear as comic characters. They appear as expert witnesses.
I particularly like the way their real intellectual authority becomes part of the fictional machinery.
A made-up person acquires cultural legitimacy because real people remember him.
It is a wonderfully elegant joke about documentary itself. We tend to trust photographs, witnesses and experts because these are the things documentaries traditionally use to establish truth.
Zelig supplies all of them and uses them to prove something that never happened.
The film invents a man, surrounds him with evidence, and lets our trust in documentary technique do the rest.
The fake popular culture surrounding Leonard may be even better.
Once Zelig becomes famous, America does what America does remarkably well: it turns him into merchandise.
There are toys, dances, newspaper stories and novelty songs. His condition becomes entertainment. The frightened man underneath it disappears behind the public phenomenon.
Dick Hyman’s music is brilliant here because the songs do not sound like contemporary comedy numbers pretending to be old.
They sound as though somebody really might have recorded them during the 1920s or 1930s.
Titles such as Leonard the Lizard, Doin’ the Chameleon and Chameleon Days transform a medical condition into a craze.
Mae Questel’s performance of Chameleon Days is especially effective because it completes the illusion that Zelig briefly became part of popular American history.
Fame itself becomes another form of transformation.
Leonard begins as somebody desperate to disappear into a crowd. Celebrity then makes it impossible for him to disappear anywhere.
People who previously would never have noticed him suddenly want to own part of him.
The public response changes just as rapidly in the opposite direction.
When scandals and accusations emerge, the fascination turns into hostility.
This is another area where the film still feels surprisingly modern.
Public figures are created, celebrated, commodified, condemned and replaced at extraordinary speed. The person at the centre can become almost incidental to the story everybody else is telling about them.
Zelig is perfect material for that machinery because he has spent his entire life allowing other people to determine who he should be.
America first turns Zelig’s need to belong into entertainment, then punishes him when the entertainment stops being convenient.
The most unsettling extension of the film’s idea comes when Leonard disappears and eventually turns up in Nazi Germany.
It makes disturbing sense.
A man who automatically becomes like the people around him is extraordinarily vulnerable to whatever group happens to surround him.
Conformity, which has previously been treated largely as social anxiety, suddenly becomes politically dangerous.
Leonard has spent the film avoiding the responsibility of difference. Under fascism, that instinct reaches its ugliest possible destination.
Allen stages the discovery brilliantly by placing Zelig inside genuine footage of a Nazi rally. Eudora recognises him, and for a moment the entire absurd fictional biography collides with one of the darkest realities of twentieth-century history.
Yet the film remains a comedy.
Their escape in an aeroplane becomes gloriously ridiculous. Eudora loses control, Leonard responds by becoming an expert pilot and they somehow return to America after flying upside down.
The transformation that has caused so many problems finally becomes useful.
There is something satisfying about that reversal. Leonard does not defeat his condition in a neat medical sense. Instead the very thing that made him helpless becomes, briefly, the thing that allows him to act.
And because this is Zelig, the absurd feat instantly becomes another piece of public history.
He returns to America as a hero.
The documentary records it all.
Zelig spends his life changing because he is frightened. In the end, one of those changes unexpectedly gives him the courage he never believed he possessed.
For all the technical invention, I think the film survives because the central idea remains so human.
Wanting to belong is not unusual.
Most people know the feeling of entering a room and immediately wondering what version of themselves will work best there.
We become slightly different with colleagues, friends, family and strangers. Sometimes that is simply ordinary social behaviour.
The problem comes when adaptation turns into disappearance.
Leonard has spent so long trying to become acceptable that he has never had the chance to discover what he actually thinks.
That is why the final Moby-Dick joke works so well for me.
The book began as the symbol of his fear of admitting ignorance. At the end of his life, his regret is that he has only just started reading it.
It is funny, but also oddly touching.
Leonard no longer has to pretend he has read the book.
He can simply read it.
That tiny distinction contains much of what the film has been about.
There is freedom in being able to say what you know, what you do not know, what you like and what you dislike without constantly checking whether everybody around you agrees.
Zelig takes that familiar anxiety and turns it into fake history.
It is an extraordinarily clever film technically, but I do not return to it simply to admire the effects.
I return because behind all the newsreels, celebrity witnesses, novelty songs and historical jokes is a very simple character who wants what almost everybody wants.
He wants to be accepted.
The mistake is believing he has to become somebody else to achieve it.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
The “Human Chameleon”, whose overwhelming need for acceptance causes him to physically and psychologically resemble whoever surrounds him.
Mia Farrow
The psychiatrist who studies Zelig’s extraordinary condition and gradually becomes the person most determined to find the man beneath the transformations.
Patrick Horgan
The authoritative documentary voice guiding the audience through Zelig’s apparently extraordinary place in twentieth-century history.
Stephanie Farrow
Eudora’s sister, appearing within the elaborate network of interviews and testimony used to reconstruct the Zelig story.
John Rothman
One of the fictional witnesses whose recollections help give the mock-documentary its convincing appearance of historical research.
Deborah Rush
Another figure drawn into the increasingly complicated public history surrounding Leonard Zelig and his many transformations.
Dick Hyman creates the soundtrack to a celebrity who never existed
Music is essential to the illusion of Zelig. Dick Hyman did not simply provide accompaniment: he created novelty songs that make Leonard Zelig sound like a genuine popular-culture phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s.
Chameleon Days
Sung by Mae Questel, Chameleon Days is exactly the sort of novelty number that might have accompanied a genuine national craze. It helps transform Zelig from a fictional character into someone who appears to have left traces throughout American popular culture.
Songs that make the documentary fiction feel real
Hyman created six original pieces associated with Leonard Zelig, written and performed in styles that could plausibly belong to the period represented on screen.
Their titles turn the Human Chameleon into a genuine popular craze: Leonard the Lizard, Doin’ the Chameleon, You May Be Six People, But I Love You, Reptile Eyes and The Changing Man Concerto.
Existing recordings and standards are woven through the film as well, allowing Hyman’s fictional Zelig music to sit naturally inside the musical world of the 1920s and 1930s.
Leonard the Lizard
Sung by Bernie Knee, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells, the song turns Zelig’s strange condition into the kind of popular novelty that might genuinely have inspired a dance craze.
Doin’ the Chameleon
Another specially created period number that helps sell the idea that Zelig’s celebrity spread through American popular culture.
You May Be Six People, But I Love You
The title alone captures the way Hyman turns Zelig’s psychiatric condition into the language of popular entertainment.
The Changing Man Concerto
Hyman even gives the fictional celebrity a concert piece, extending the musical joke beyond popular songs into the supposed cultural legacy of Leonard Zelig.
Locations
Because Zelig has to appear as though it was filmed across decades of American history, its locations work very differently from those in most Woody Allen films.
New York studios and genuine East Coast locations were combined with enormous quantities of archival material, allowing Allen and Gordon Willis to create a world in which newly filmed scenes seem to have been discovered alongside genuine twentieth-century newsreels.
Kaufman Astoria Studios
A number of the film’s interiors were created at the historic Astoria studios, a particularly appropriate location given their own history stretching back to the silent and early sound eras.
John Jay College
John Jay College of Criminal Justice on West 51st Street was among the New York locations used for the production.
Teaneck
Filming also took place in Teaneck, a location with its own connection to early American cinema through D. W. Griffith and the Biograph Company.
Long Beach
Long Beach supplied additional location material, including an aerial view of the old promenade.
Old Bethpage Village Restoration
The historic village setting was used briefly during production, providing architecture capable of fitting naturally into Zelig’s reconstructed past.
History Reconstructed
The film’s most important “location” is ultimately the historical archive itself: existing newsreels and photographs are blended with new footage until Leonard Zelig appears to occupy genuine history.
Awards and Recognition
Best Cinematography Nomination
Gordon Willis received an Academy Award nomination for the remarkable work required to make newly photographed material appear to belong inside decades-old archival footage.
Best Costume Design Nomination
Santo Loquasto received an Academy Award nomination for costumes that had to remain convincing across Zelig’s shifting 1920s and 1930s settings.
Best Motion Picture Nomination
Zelig was nominated for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy at the 1984 Golden Globe Awards.
Woody Allen
Allen received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy for his performance as Leonard Zelig.
Original Screenplay Nomination
Allen’s screenplay was nominated by BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay.
Best Cinematography
Gordon Willis won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Cinematography for his work on the film.
Comedy Screenplay Nomination
Allen was nominated for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen.
A Landmark Mockumentary
Its seamless combination of invented biography, real historical footage and documentary testimony remains one of the most technically distinctive achievements in Allen’s filmography.