By ROD DREHER
New York Post
For this slight comedy about the manic chase of a false idol, Allen must have finally taken to heart critics' complaints that, at age 62, he's too old to credibly play older men looking for love with significantly younger women. He cast poor Kenneth Branagh in the Woody role, with bizarre and wildly unsuccessful results.
Branagh is an excellent actor, of course. But as the confused magazine writer Lee Simon, he does nothing more than a terribly unconvincing impersonation of Woody Allen. Lee is a celebrity journalist who has a midlife crisis and dumps his wife, Robin. He falls victim to the siren song of celebrity, and, like Fellini's Roman scribe Marcello, fancies the dolce vita of hanging out with stars.
But Branagh's neurotic lines and his stammering delivery are utterly Woody, to the point of complete distraction. Never mind us - what about the women in the picture? Lee dallies with several babes, including Famke Janssen as a book editor, Winona Ryder as an aspiring stage actress and, in a brief but show-stopping performance, Charlize Theron as a supermodel. What on earth any of these women would see in a yammering yutz like Lee is anybody's guess.
The usually dependable Judy Davis doesn't fare much better in her underwritten role as the wife who suddenly finds herself abandoned by her selfish husband. She attracts the sincere romantic attentions of a TV talk-show producer (Joe Mantegna), but insecure and untrusting, she resists his advances. In one embarrassingly unfunny scene, she visits a courtesan (Bebe Neuwirth) for oral-sex lessons involving a banana. This kind of cheap tee-hee-hee humor is beneath Allen's comic sensibilities - and it's done better by the Farrelly brothers, anyway.
What keeps Celebrity interesting and mildly fun is the fast-moving plot, which whisks us from scene to scene at a revolving-door pace, and, paradoxically, lets us gawk at celebrities making cameo appearances. The one destined to be the most talked-about is Leonardo DiCaprio's 10 minutes as Brandon, a bratty young film superstar who travels with a posse and carouses wildly with drugs and groupies. Sounds like type-casting.
Does Woody have any new ideas? Celebrity is crammed with either shopworn Woodyisms or exceedingly banal observations. Woody Allen is a smart man, but any fresh-out-of-Harvard junior writer on The Simpsons could make hash of Woody's startlingly unsavvy take on celebrity culture.
Though Celebrity tries - Lord, how it tries - it can't find anything amusing or insightful to say about famed plastic surgeons, trendy religious gurus, exploitative TV talk shows and bubble-headed TV entertainment reporters. Allen has made an entire movie commenting on the crassness of celebrity and hasn't even touched the sharpness and acerbity of the Alan Alda character in Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The one half-good idea in Celebrity is Allen's likening of the pursuit of celebrity to the pursuit of true love. Both are capricious and involve personal and psychological risks, but only one has the potential for fulfillment. Woody seems to suggest that a society in which people take their cues on how to behave and what to esteem from self-absorbed celebrities is one that will have a tough time knowing what is good and lasting in life.
That's the movie lost somewhere in Celebrity, which, like what it purports to criticize, is diverting but feather-light and pseudo-profound.