A Man for All Seasons

ZELIG is every bit the triumph people have raved it is, Witty, it is clearly innovative, with its documentary format and advanced splicing technique. Painstakingly perfect, it weighs in at under 90 minutes without announce of flab to spare.

In some ways, Zelig is just the latest dose of the standard Woody Allen potion. (Some of the more recent disasters like A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy excepted.) The film focuses in on a New York neurotic Jew who bumbles along with one-liners trying to cope with his problems. Leonard Zelig's chief disorder is that he wants to be liked by everyone. It starts when he feels compelled to join in a discussion of Moby Dick although he has never read the book. Zelig's condition worsens until he assumes the characteristics of the people he is with: Chinese with Chinese, Black with Blacks, American Indian with American Indian, fat with fat men, a psychiatrist with psychiatrists.

But Zelig encompasses more than just one man's extended analysis session. In this film, Allen puts America on the couch. Unlike Annie Hall, or Manhattan, Zelig doesn't depict the main character's perception of the world, but vice versa. It is not even really a movie, but instead a fictional documentary: a fabricated composite of newsreels, newspaper article collages, and interviews today with people who knew him then, as well as with current experts on the subject (Allen brings together an impressive array of intellectual heavyweights to mock themselves, including John Morton Blumlisted as authoring "Interpreting Zelig"--and Susan Sontag--author of "Against Interpretations.")

In the late 20s, the "Chameleon Man," as the media called him, the country; America was, after all, one big prosperous, happy-go-lucky speakeasy nation constantly seeking diversions, Zelig--like Lindbergh or the Lindbergh trial--helped satiate their leach-like needs. He toured on freak shows. He spurred a dance craze: the Chameleon rivalled the Charleston in popularity. He triggered a host of songs (Cole Porter once wrote "You're the tops, you're Leonard Zelig--except he couldn't find anything to rhyme with Zelig). Zelig paraphenalia--ashtrays, jewelry, and general knick-knacks--cropped up and sold briskly.

BUT LEONARD ZELIG WAS NOT a happy man. By taking on the traits of everyone else, he left none for himself. He went into therapy with Dr. Louise Fletcher (Mia Farrow) who after extensive sesions in isolation, cured him.

By the time Zelig was better, society had changed too. America had plunged into the depths of the Depression and needed a hero and they turned to Zelig. After licking his affliction, Zelig became a model of the determined battler who overcame his troubles. "That shows what you can do if you're a total psychotic," he told millions of children in a radio message. He appeared at celebrity bashes, dining with William Randolph Hearst, golfing with Bobby Jones.

But a troubled community also seeks scapegoats, and the adoring crowds who initially put Zelig on a pedestal were just as quick to grind him into the earth. Though cured of his disease, many of the side effects lingered and came back to haunt him, including the countless women he married while pretending to be different men, the operations he performed while pretending to be a doctor, until finally he became the victim of a moral majority-type crusade.

Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers dryly states that Zelig symbolized the early 20th century Jewish immigrant: "He wanted to assimilate like crazy." Through this character Allen more than ever before finally captures the American mentality. Noting the violent vicissitudes of the bizarre man's career, Howe observes "that's what the 20s and 30s were like."