Melinda and Melinda

Woody Allen, 2005

This year is somewhat of a milestone for Woody Allen. Not only does it see the release of his 40^th film, more or less, as well as his 70^th birthday, but it puts us within spitting distance of the 30^th anniversary of what most people consider his all-time classic, “Annie Hall.” So it's unsurprising that many critics have looked at this film compared to that 1977 opus, variously praising it as a (near) return to form or deriding it for showcasing Allen as hopelessly stymied in a bygone age, focusing his films on characters who haven't existed for at least 30 years, if they ever did at all.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. Yes, this movie does continue in the vein of “Anything Else,” fitting in to Allen's return to neurotic romantic comedies set in present-day New York after various formalist experiments like “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Everyone Says I Love You” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.” True as well that his characters, screenwriters, filmmakers, and actors who philosophize and wax poetic about Checkhov and Freud, are a dying breed, if not altogether vanished. “Melinda and Melinda” is at once more and less than this though.

It begins with playwrights having coffee in Manhattan, and debating the essence of life; more specifically, whether said essence is comic or tragic. Someone at the table tells an anecdote which the audience is not privy to, and invites the quarreling parties to decide if it is comic or tragic. This is all accomplished in about five minutes, and the movie is off and running.

It is a dual story, with one playwright giving the story a tragic edge, the other a comic one. The two are intercut, with occasional returns to our storytellers thrown in. Like many Allen films, this one follows creative Upper-West Siders as they have artistic and romantic breakdowns and hook-ups, with things more or less working out in the end. The casts for the two films differ almost completely, with only Rhada Mitchell as the titular Melinda and some bit players featured in both. Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet star in the comedy, while Chloe Sevigny and Johnny Lee Miller (child hacker-turned hero Zero Cool from “Hackers”) star in the tragedy.

The unfortunate thing about “Melinda and Melinda,” however, is that its “tragic” segments are almost as hilarious as its comedy ones, although for different reasons. While the comedy soars thanks to Will Ferrel's extraterrestrial likability and comic timing, the drama lags due to its extremely poor acting and almost total failure to generate sympathy for its protagonists.

Sevigny is consistently laughable as she tries to pass herself off as a Manhattan socialite and piano virtuoso, using words she wouldn't have seen since the SATs, if she had ever actually taken them. She's a blank slate, totally failing to communicate emotion as she stares around herself, desperately hoping for a freak of some kind to take the heat off of her. Sevingy is no good as a romantic lead, working much better as a sympathetic infusion of normality in an insane world, the cute one among cat killers and albinos in “Gummo,” or the cute one among shallow killers in “American Psycho.” Even her role in 2003's “Shattered Glass” as a young political genius/magazine writer was a stretch, despite having the relatively easy job of playing opposite a robotic Hayden Christnesen.

The comedy sections are brilliant, however, and Woody Allen has found in Will Ferrel a comedian who grasps how to speak his lines to get laughs. Virtually every Allen line is amusing, if you only know how to say it, which Ferrel does.

This is all aside from the visually hateful look of the film. If you're to believe the lighting, the entire movie takes place at about 5:20 PM in the summertime, which is to say every scene is overflowing with improbably golden lighting. This would be excusable if he was photographing something interesting. Instead, these effects serve merely to illuminated the interiors of multi million-dollar Manhattan lofts which none of his characters could afford. Allen's trademark New York exteriors are all but nonexistent in this film, with a sequence at a horse race being virtually the only EVA his characters embark on.

All told, “Melinda and Melinda” is not good viewing. The drama portions are so drearily turgid that they drag the comedy parts down with them, constantly killing any sense of urgency or consistency they'd managed to generate. One hopes that Allen has gotten whatever statement he was trying to communicate out of his system with this film. Like a friend who's constantly pontificating, I enjoy many, but not all, of Allen's artistic statements. I applaud him for taking chances, but I just didn't really enjoy this one. Hopefully, we'll be more in sync for “Match Point,” his next film (already in post-production), and his first shot entirely in England. If not, I'm willing to try again with his next one, whatever it may be or whenever it comes along.