In the halcyon days of the past, a
new Woody Allen movie generated excitement in the hearts of countless viewers,
especially hip urbanites, who believed the writer-director spoke to them in
their language, addressing the seriocomic neuroses of their time and place.
A generation and some 30 films later,
many of them simply repeating with small variations his previous plots,
characters, subjects, and themes, a good deal of the thrill of anticipation has
dissipated, along with the humor and relevance. Now one of the major interests
lies in figuring out just who will play the Woody Allen character in the latest
movie, (this time around it’s Will Ferrell), which suggests the direction of
his career.
His new movie, Melinda and Melinda, explores most of the familiar Allen territory,
areas of intellectual and personal concern that provide the matter of virtually
all his work. The picture opens in a chi-chi little Village bistro, with some
writers discussing the vexing question of whether life, and therefore their
plays, should be regarded as tragedy or comedy.
To illustrate their arguments, which
rely on some profound banalities, they tell each other the story — really two
separate stories — of a young woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) who
unexpectedly enters the personal circles of two separate but similar groups of
characters and proceeds to disrupt the lives of all the people she encounters.
In the allegedly tragic story,
Melinda intrudes on a dinner party given by some old college friends, an actor
named Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) and his wife Laurel (Chloë Sevigny), who hope to
convince one of the guests, a director, to cast Lee in his new play. Melinda
temporarily moves in with Lee and Laurel, who try to help her with her
multitude of problems, which include a messy divorce, the loss of custody of
her children, and even the murder of her lover.
No matter how grim the material, it’s
difficult to take it all terribly seriously, since that dark story alternates
with a lighter one in which Melinda lives in the same building as another
couple, a fledgling director, Louise (Stephanie Roth Haberle), and a struggling
actor, Hobie (Will Ferrell). Melinda interrupts their dinner party, given to
sweet-talk a producer into backing Louise’s movie.
In the second plot, the presence of
Melinda triggers an entirely different set of actions and emotions in the
people she encounters; at the same time, the obvious parallels between the two
distinct groups fuel the discussion back at the bistro.
In addition to the common situation
of the intruder and the married couple, the two stories sometimes share
material. In both, for example, Melinda meets and falls for a handsome black
pianist-composer. In the allegedly tragic story he writes operas and talks a
glib, pseudo-poetic line of gab guaranteed to seduce the purest and most
recalcitrant female; in the comic version, he writes popular music and barely
speaks a word. In the first story, the pianist ultimately betrays Melinda with
her friend, while in the second, Melinda ultimately dumps the musician for the
Woody Allen surrogate: go figure.
A considerable amount of sexual
rearrangement takes place among the numerous characters in a relatively densely
populated movie, especially in the comic version of Melinda’s life. The various
couplings lead to the very few laughs and some broadly farcical moments, most
of them obvious and unoriginal. Allen resorts to some juvenile gags and some
tired repetition of the sort of shtick he’s done a hundred times before, most
of them revolving around the plight of the neurotic, impotent weakling’s
efforts to attract the affections of Melinda.
Like just about all of Woody Allen’s
work, Melinda and Melinda restricts
most of its action to the posh upper East Side of Manhattan, chiefly a series
of wonderful apartments that only the wealthiest New Yorkers ever see, let
alone inhabit, underlining the narrow and essentially unreal provincialism of
his world view.
Along with the dark eatery where the
characters in both stories return again and again, the locations provide a
sense of unity and connection to the parallel versions of Melinda’s life. Those
locations, the fine lighting, and the terrific musical score provide a most
pleasant surface polish to an otherwise dull set of people and circumstances.
The manner in which the two distinct
stories at times run parallel, and at others overlap or merge into each other,
with occasional interruptions from the two writers, constitutes just about the
only really interesting element in the narrative. With the exception of Radha
Mitchell, for whom the movie constitutes a terrific showpiece, the actors
impart little vitality to the script, but mostly simply speak flat, wooden
dialogue at each other with a minimum of conviction and almost no signs of
actual life as we commonly live it, which aptly sums up the whole of Melinda and Melinda.
Melinda and Melinda (PG-13),
starring Radha Mitchell, Will Ferrell, Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Roth Haberle,
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jonny Lee Miller, Brooke Smith, Neil Pepe, Josh Brolin, Larry
Pine, Wallace Shawn; written and directed by Woody Allen. The Little Theatres;
Pittsford Plaza Cinema.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2005.
