Zelig - 1983 - 4 Stars

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan


Zelig is a fake documentary about Leonard Zelig: The Human Chameleon. A man who has such an intense desire to be liked that he takes on the characteristics of other people in his environment, including gaining weight, growing facial hair or even changing the colour of his skin if need be. I call Zelig a "fake documentary" and not a "mockumentary" because it predates the original mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap and it shares no stylistic characteristics with Guest films or The Office style TV shows. It is not improvised and has zero talking head interviews. It is not aping fly-on-the-wall documentaries, it is aping historical documentaries. Allen and Gordon Willis impeccably recreate this genre whose primary tools are two classic stimulants: archival footage and professional narration. Casting Patrick Horgan, the voice of dozens of Sherlock Holmes audiobooks, as the narrator, gives the fake documentary authenticity and the film a straight man. Allen plays the funny man and his mannered, nervous speech plays well off Horgan's dry narration. Horgan is delivering monologues for most of the film, but Allen's writing and directing and performance consistently wring laughs out of gags in "historical" pictures, videos and songs.


It can be tough to notice because it's often cloaked in self-deprecation or perfectly-constructed jokes, but Woody Allen is very perceptive about the human condition. His self-deprecation cloaks soul-baring moments in irony, which lessens their emotional impact, but is also true to his characters. Their neuroses are not quirks, but defense mechanisms because the characters are too afraid of saying something honest and direct about themselves without being protected by a veil of cleverness. The documentary framework of Zelig might appear overly clever, but it mirrors Allen's characters; their film is full of winking ironic moments, but the story is still told in a realistic way. The structure allows Zelig to satire documentaries, news media, males roles in society and The Golden Era Hollywood, however Zelig is a minor figure and if his story were told it would probably be told in psych-textbooks and dry black and white documentaries. The commitment to imitating, but not mocking the genre grounds the movie and prevents the pervasive irony from ruining the film's sentiment.


The premise of Zelig seems so broad, like a mediocre SNL sketch, that through the first act I found it hard to believe there would be any insights on human behaviour. However I didn't really care because there are so many great one liners throughout, " I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people." "I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women." "The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew, that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian, saw him as a triple threat." However as the movie progresses it turns into a poignant fable about conformity, insecurity and neurosis. If one tries to fit in too much they lose their unique humanity, if they constantly speak their mind they are boorish and obnoxious: the goal is to find the unattainable golden mean. Similarly Zelig needs to maintain a tonal balance between a legitimate insight on humanity and killer punchlines that threaten to undermine the earnestness that is earned via the original insight. Fortunately Allen's ability to maintain a tonal balance is one of his great strengths and he succeeds in making a wickedly funny, touching, reflection on neurosis and an effective love story.

The Dictator - 2012 - 3 Stars

Director: Larry Charles
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kinglsey, Jason Mantzoukas

"It's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive…This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence."

"A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity."

"Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing."

"The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism."

Those who pay attention to the critical consensus and review aggregators are aware that those laudative reviews are not about The Dictator. They are about the first Larry Charles directed, Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When Borat was released I was already a huge Baron Cohen fan because of his HBO series Da Ali G Show. I was incredibly excited to see Borat, especially after it received the kind of hyperbolic praise quoted above, but I ended up underwhelmed. I never liked watching more than 2 episodes of Da Ali G Show back to back because it was too uncomfortable and Borat was 84 minutes long; almost three episodes back to back. As a result the movie felt much longer than it actually was. I don't know if this is true, but It felt like most of Borat's raves were from people unfamiliar with the TV show, the satire in the film was no more cutting than the dozens of episodes I'd seen on HBO and it was odd that what I thought was another addition to the Baron Cohen oeuvre was being called his magnum opus.

My other criticism of Borat, which sounds hypocrtitical given my praise of the TV show, was how loosely plotted it was. It was a series of set pieces back to back with loose bits of connective tissue about Borat trying to find Pamela Anderson because he saw her on Baywatch in Kazakhstan. After watching The Dictator, I realize that one of Borat's biggest strength and its most dangerous decision was its loose structure. I can't think of a single post-Borat comedy with a wide-release that was more concerned with delivering hilarious comic set pieces than servicing love interests or redeeming our hero or raising the stakes via cliches (sick parent/grandparent, house foreclosing, etc). Even when idiosyncratic comedic voices are given the opportunity to make a film, their films inevitably follow a generic structure: our hero is at point A, hits rock bottom, meets a girl, slowly climbs up to above point A to point B, falls to even lower rock bottom usually due to a plot contrivance introduced in the first act, triumphs at the end marries the girl and rises to point C where everyone is happy. Lots of mumblecore movies follow this arc, every Apatow movie follows this arc, even Pootie Tang which possesses a bizarre and unique comic voice follows this arc and The Dictator follows this arc.

A lot has been made about televised drama surpassing film dramas in the new millennium, I feel that argument is incorrect and reductive for reasons I may outline in a longer post, but ultimately it is because film directors have more varied perspectives and means of expressing themselves than television show runners. Not a lot has been made about television comedy surpassing, movie comedy and I feel there is a much more compelling argument to be made in favour of that because televised comedy favors idiosyncratic voices. Televised comedy allows Adam Reed or Dan Harmon or the aforementioned Pootie Tang director Louis CK a large amount of freedom; sometimes they fail spectacularly, but at least they are taking creative risks, instead of developing star vehicles for bankable actors and hoping by the end there are enough funny jokes that the movie will gain an audience.

The Dictator is a fish out of water comedy about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen, who is in New York City to give a speech to the UN, where, for plot reasons I won't get into, he is usurped by a body double and is forced to live in New York without the palatial luxuries he is accustomed to. Unlike Borat, The Dictator relies on a strong cast of supporting comic actors, such as Fred Armisen, Nasim Pedrad and Jon Glaser, but the real highlight of the movie is Jason Manzoutkas, best known for scene-stealing guest spots on Parks and Recreation and The League, who frequently gets bigger laughs in scenes where he has to go head to head with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Dictators aren't the hardest people to satire, it's not as if there are many people that are pro-tyranny. There was a time where mocking tyrants was a daring act, but not in a culture where there are Gadaffi Meme-Generators and we are 5 years removed from an SNL sketch where Adam Levine serenades Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Despite that The Dictator maintains a sharp, albeit unoriginal satirical edge throughout and is willing to mine jokes from everything in a dictator's life. There is an inspired bit of satire delivered via a clunky monologue where Aladeen compares America's corporate oligarchy to a dictatorship, but generally the strongest jokes in the film are observational jokes about the minutia of Aladeen's day to day life, which I feel must have been written by co-writers and former Seinfeld scribes Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaeffer. The broader comic setpieces including the "9/11 2" joke that has been shown in all the previews are overwritten set pieces, that require suspending your disbelief even in The Dictator's absurd universe.

While in New York Aladeen meets a feminist-socialist-hippie-brooklynite played by an enjoyable Anna Farris. The films gets some comic mileage out of Baron Cohen taking over her food co-op and making it ruin more efficiently through his dictatorial attitude, before they ... fall in love swoon. Ostensibly they are mocking, genre conventions, but they are still peddling the hoary tropes comedy audiences have become accustomed to. In Borat there was a feeling that anything could happen at any time, The Dictator shows flashes of that comic anarchy, but ultimately the packaging is so insipid that that any time you feel anything can happen you are quickly reminded that there is only one thing that can happen.