The Wages Of Fame

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh) is a man in a rumpled corduroy jacket with his nose pressed eagerly against the double-glazed windows of fame. A failed novelist, he writes celebrity profiles for magazines and subsists emotionally on such crusts--a bit of gossip, a moment of false intimacy--as the famous discard as they pass by.

Robin Simon (Judy Davis) is Lee's estranged wife, a former teacher of Chaucer and a quivering mass of neuroses, willing to try anything--religious retreats, plastic surgery--to get her postdivorce life back together.

Woody Allen's Celebrity tracks the former's possibly predictable fall and the latter's entirely unexpected rise within the tensely striving world of Manhattan's media and cultural demimonde. Since Branagh's performance (rather daringly) imitates Allen's anxiously stammering screen persona, and Davis is doing something she has done--expertly--for the writer-director before, playing a jilted, tilted woman, it may sound as if this is yet another of Allen's comically discordant chamber pieces about the impossibility of permanent connection between postmodern urbanites who think too much about themselves and feel too little for each other.

But as Allen traces Lee's and Robin's parallel courses toward opposite fates, Celebrity, even though it is shot in austere black and white on palpably real locations, turns into something new for him: an epic. It contains 242 speaking parts and 5,128 extras--forces sufficient, if deployed in a different context, to make a biblical spectacle. Or--better comparison--a screen version of Thackeray's Vanity Fair or some other satirical, multilayered saga of halfway decent, halfway desperate people trying to make their way in a corrupt society.

The pilgrim's path is made easier, Allen says, if he or she is armored by innocence rather than made vulnerable by naked need. It also helps if there is someone utterly indifferent to fame who can lend a guiding hand. It's Robin's good luck that such a figure interrupts her consultation with the cosmetic surgeon. He's a television producer named Tony Gardella (Joe Mantegna) doing a story on the currently hot doctor, and he thinks Robin looks fine just the way she is. And he thinks she might shake her funk if she comes to work for him.

Good idea. Like Allen himself, Tony brings clear vision but no reformist zeal to the business of chronicling celebrity life. It's just something he, like a dwindling few of his fellow citizens, is trying to live with (and in his case, make a living from) as rationally as possible. He guesses that Robin's self-consciousness, her sense that she doesn't belong in the same room with the rich and famous, will play well on TV. She's as addled as anyone in her audience would be in fast company, so of course viewers identify with her. And grant her stardom.

The secret of her success naturally eludes her former mate. Close, yearning observation has led him to believe that the celebrated are mostly not more gifted or harder working than he is. He thinks if he can just worm his way closer to the center of their world, he will be allowed to partake of their magic.

Bad idea. They can smell his desperation. It invites their casual contempt. When a movie star (Melanie Griffith) grants him a sexual favor, it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime benisons queens sometimes bestow on a lucky serf, not the beginning of a relationship. When a supermodel (Charlize Theron) catches a glimpse of his only glamorous asset, a classic Aston Martin sports car, she thinks its owner may do as an escort for a night on the town, but her attention keeps wandering.

The feckless journalist has a dreadful movie script he's trying to push on his interviewees, and that leads to the film's central, most harrowing passage. For when he arrives to discuss it with Brandon Darrow (Leonardo DiCaprio, in a chilling performance), the star is exercising his power by beating up a girlfriend and trashing a hotel room. Undaunted, Lee starts pitching. And pitching--through a night of high-stakes gambling (he loses, of course), drugs and group sex. Slyly, sadistically, Brandon alternately encourages and discourages him. Degradation is power's prerogative. And besides, it amuses him.

The experience briefly sobers Lee. He has, but fails to appreciate, an equivalent to Robin's Tony. She's a pretty, sensible book editor (Famke Janssen) who supports his return to fiction. But even with her patient encouragement, he can't stay straight for long. He betrays her for a promising, utterly self-absorbed young actress (Winona Ryder). Maybe he can get in on the ground floor of her celebrity.

Don't count on it. And don't count on Allen for much sympathy for Lee or anyone else caught up in this game. This is a coldly mocking film, alert to the fact that politicians under investigation are still welcome at celebrity golf tournaments; that famous authors, abetted by their editors, can steal unfamous authors' ideas with impunity; that skinheads, rabbis and lawyers from the A.C.L.U. can grouse together affably in the greenroom about who ate up all the bagels before going out to scream at one another on a TV talk show. These people all know that what they share--the media's avid gaze--sets them apart from the multitudes it ignores while creating a bond among the favored that is impenetrable to the anonymous, and is, in various ways, dangerous to all concerned.

What the elect don't know, but Allen insists on, is that the state of grace they enjoy is not secular sainthood. That is to say, it is generally unearned by good works and suffering. It is, at best, a capricious cosmic joke and therefore nothing to get puffed up about. "I've become the kind of woman I've always hated," Robin says wonderingly at the end of her journey, "but I'm happier." There's a moral buried inside that irony. Or maybe it's the nasty core truth of our times. Whatever it is, Celebrity is the first fully serious (and seriously funny) movie about the issue that touches, and ultimately subsumes, everything we feel about fame and the discontents it breeds.