CELEBRITY

I want my Woody.

Those of us who love Woody Allen fall into two camps: those who love Woody the auteur and those who love Woody the stuttering pasty human. As a fanatic member of the latter squadron this film critic acknowledges that what she finds to be the biggest flaw of Celebrity may instead be read by some filmgoers as an overdue relief: dear Woody is nowhere to be seen.

Allen has cast Kenneth Branagh as Lee Simon, as uncannily familiar whimpering and shaking fellow in his mid-life crisis. Lee is a travel writer who has seen little beyond New England due to his fear of flying. He has just left Robin (Judy Davis), his wife of 16 years, to pursue other things, such as Bryant Park catwalks, movie stars and young struggling actresses.

New York City looks fabulous in Celebrity. The entire film is shot in black and white. Slushy modern day New York has been transformed into a holiday world of sunglasses and starry skies, nightclubs and fast sportscars. In this glamorous atmosphere, it is easy to understand, if not defend, the famous name game that almost every American plays. Allen feeds the audience with pieces of the very game at which he pokes fun by casting real life bignames as fictitious big names.

In the beginning of the film, Lee turns to Nola, an extra on a film set played by Winona Ryder, and asks her, "Where do I know you from?" The volatile Leonardo DiCaprio plays Brandon Darrow, the heartthrob movie actor who bursts into temper tantrums in his suite at The Stanhope Hotel. When he is escorted outside by a police officer, he is greeted by hordes of pubescent girls waving Titanic-sized glossies of the superstar. The props people certainly didn't have to look far to procure those gems.

Celebrity keeps the audience half-heartedly giggling throughout its projection. Sadly, by the time the final credits roll, it is apparent that the sloppy film never builds up to anything more than two hours of very timely silliness. The scenes have no reasons for being where they are; they could easily be reshuffled to produce a different film of similar merit. However, Allen does deserve credit for being more clever than most modern day filmmakers.

Seduction goes wrong in signature Woody fashion when the dame Lee picks up from the catwalk, Supermodel, claims that her only flaw is that she is "poly-morphously perverse." After dinner, they head off to the nightclub El Flamingo. Sadly, their sexy dancing session at the club is interrupted when Supermodel sneezes and realizes that she is in dire need of echinacea. The two have to search New York in the middle of the night for the wonder drug, which, need-less to say, gets in the way of Lee and Supermodel's going home together. Luckily, however, another club attendee has some in his jacket pocket.

Throughout the film, Lee runs about, repeatedly pushing one lady friend aside to make room for the next. Just as Lee never settles down with any one of his companions, Allen also flits about, refusing to stick to any element of the film long enough to develop it into an integral part of a complex structure.

Allen seems to achieve some personal vengeance through this film as well. Robin, at the insistence of her best friend, goes to Dr. Lupus, a corpulent celebrity plastic surgeon. Dr. Lupus has plenty of suggestions for Robin, asking her, "Why should you be anything less than perfect?" Robin looks disarmingly like Mia Farrow, with wavy hair and a disheveled Cantabrigian fashion sense. Things aren't looking too good for Robin; she has just been dumped (not for her daughter, though), and she can't quite seem to figure out how to attend cocktail parties and remain sober for more than ten minutes. She visits a professional whore (Bebe Neuwirth) for sexual advice. This unravels into a tasteless scene of two grown women simulating oral sex on bananas, the new Mia Farrow predictably performing less than swimmingly. Later on she remarks that she has turned from an English teacher into the kind of woman she hated previously, but she's happier now. It is funny that in attacking the phenomenon of celebrities' opening their bedroom doors and allowing their fans to become intimately acquainted with them, Allen does the very same thing.

Celebrity is different from Allen's previous works in other ways, too. Celebrity is certainly his most gentile film to date. The word "bagel" is uttered only once. The only scene with rabbis in it features the yarmukled men trapped in a room with a group of teenage skin-heads. Most of the film is shot in locations besides those that are usually featured in Allen's stories; now characters are uprooted, on the streets, at parties, in movies, and so forth.

Perhaps it is fitting that a character who does not know who he is not is played by an actor who does know how to play him (Am I Woody? Am I not?). Allen's allegory about how tasteless we have become with our obsession with a syndicated world is, in its own way, a vapid world, inhabited by characters who are as silly as are we.