Is life inherently comical or inherently tragic? Thus begins Woody Allen's latest film, which, to no one's surprise, deals with neurotic New Yorkers who argue sexual politics while pacing the tree-lined streets.
Allen has built a career upon gleaning humor and romance from urban anonymity, and this film is familiar ground for the 70-year-old filmmaker. The archetypes for an Allen film are firmly in place. The concept behind Melinda and Melinda, however, is unique, and its ingenuity is enough to sustain the viewer's interest through the rougher patches.
The idea is this: Two writers, one comic and one tragic, take the same story and spin it in two different directions. Both writers are given the same premise -- Melinda (played in both stories by Radha Mitchell) drops in unannounced at a dinner party.
The comedy writer weaves this starting point into a romantic comedy of errors. He makes Melinda the object of desire for a submissive, down-on-his-luck husband named Hobie (Will Ferrell). It takes place in a quiet neighborhood in Greenwich Village, punctuated by a breezy jazz score from the Swing Band era.
The tragic writer takes the same initial premise and portrays Melinda as a paranoid, chain-smoking bundle of nerves, who has come to stay with her best friend Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) until she can get back on her feet. It takes place in the sanitized, restrained environment of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Instead of old jazz, the tragic half of Melinda and Melinda is laced with classical music and monotone piano scores.
The comic and tragic stories are told alternately, and throughout the film, Allen stays true to his cinematic experiment. The stories are jarringly similar; identical character types, lines of dialogue and even objects and locations reoccur. Allen finds subtle ways to evoke laughter and sympathy, however, and at times, he confuses them for dramatic effect.
For example, in both stories, Melinda relates her attempt to commit suicide. In the tragedy, Allen films Melinda in a close, static shot as she recites a monologue that elaborates upon the intricate details of her depression. In the parallel comedy, Melinda overdoses on sleeping pills -- rather than focusing upon her exclusively, the camera pans out to digest other people's humorous reactions to her. In the heat of the moment, Hobie seems more concerned about Melinda ruining the rug than her need to throw up on it.
So goes the rest of the film, intriguing the viewer at some points but also steamrolling his or her sensibilities at others. The film's comedy demonstrates Allen at his best in recent years. It is full of quotable phrases and put downs; when Hobie visits a hunter's house covered with mounted animals, he asks blithely if the owner shot the furniture, too.
The tragic portions, however, alternate between being touching and unrealistic. Melinda's self-deprecating monologues, which detail everything from infidelity to murder, grab the reader's attention with their raw simplicity.
In contrast to the monologues, the character interactions are forced, and, at their worst, pompous and self-important. Without the trademark Allen humor, the script's reliance on complex verbiage, classical music references and literary quotes becomes pretentious, demonstrating Allen's admittance that he makes films for himself, not for an audience.
The acting is adequate, but the cast, particularly Ferrell, is doing a riff on a Woody Allen routine instead of adding something original. Rahdha Mitchell is the only exception to this. The viewer never gets the impression that he's watching two different characters, but rather, the same character placed in two different situations.
Melinda and Melinda is a decent film, but it's also a hugely flawed one. It's saved by its original concept, but it suffers in its delivery. Allen needs to amend his cloistered writing style if he wants to regain his former luster.
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