Word: zelig
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...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...
...Cole Porter was fascinated by him," recalls a witness. "He wrote a song: You 're the Top, You 're Leonard Zelig. But he couldn't find anything to rhyme with Zelig...
...tell the story of a first-generation American, who like many of his ilk would undergo any contortion in order to join the national mainstream, Woody Allen (who plays Zelig) has chosen a form that is utterly original in conception and exhilarating in execution. It is a parody of a television documentary, one of those compilations of old newsreels, scratchy recordings and animated stills held together by a voice-over narration. This material is supported by modern interviews, shot in jarring color, in which aged witnesses (among them Mia Farrow, who plays his psychiatric savior) testify about Zelig...
...Zelig is the culmination of a long quest by Allen. He is virtually the only celebrity who has continually investigated the values and liabilities of his own status. Three years ago, in Stardust Memories, he attempted to order these thoughts on film and was roundly criticized for so doing. In that story of a comedian oppressed by his own fame, he was unable to achieve the distance and objectivity he needed. Zelig's form provides both. Acutely satirizing mediaspeak, the film hilariously exposes the vulgarizations and misleading distortions of that language. At the same time, it touchingly demonstrates that...
Like all of Allen's best work, Zelig is, finally, a comedy of manners-public manners in this case, not private ones as in Annie Hall or Manhattan. In Yiddish it means blessed, and Zelig is, surely, in the midst of a typical American summer at the movies when almost everything is a loud assault on the senses, a benison. It is both a welcome wooing of sensibility and intellect and a film that will be recalled long after Labor Day has come and gone. -By Richard Schickel