It's the rare person who's seen every Woody Allen movie. Woody Allen may not even be that person. How else explain "Alice" or "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"? Anyway, I'd never seen "Celebrity" until this weekend. That's the one in which Kenneth Branagh plays a free-lance writer who manages to get romantically entangled, to one degree or another, with Melanie Griffith, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, and Famke Janssen. Can you tell he's the Woody stand-in?
Watching Branagh channel his inner Woody is kind of amazing. There's this whine he gets in his voice, along with a physical tentativeness, the hesitation, and general stop-and-go rhythm, that's like a RADA version of Alvy Singer. This is no small feat. Four years earlier, John Cusack played the Woody stand-in in "Bullets Over Broadway," and there's no comparison. That's just a good actor playing an underdeveloped role rather than a good actor (maybe even a great one) doing an inspired impersonation.
This got me to thinking about actors imitating other actors onscreen -- not playing them in a biopic, like Robert Downey Jr. as Charlie Chaplin, say, or in "Ed Wood" Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as Orson Welles (with vocal assistance from Maurice LaMarche). No, I mean taking over another actor's style and manner and making it his or her own. Between the cult of originality in this culture and actors' egos being what they are, this is a fairly rare occurrence. Offhand I can think of maybe half a dozen other examples beside Branagh/Allen.
