Melinda and Melinda

Here's a sentence I've wanted to write for years.

Woody Allen is back.

See, Woody went away for a while. In 1999, he wrote and directed the brilliant Sweet and Lowdown, a touching, hilarious and twisted fictional biography of a self-obsessed yet extraordinarily talented jazz guitarist. It took a style Woody had worked with before (in the fictional documentaries Zelig and Take the Money and Run, and the faux-documentary visual style of Husbands and Wives) but enlarged it, created an entire mythology around it, and provided magnificent starring roles for Sean Penn and then-newcomer Samantha Morton.

Ever since then, the Woodman's filmography's been a real garbage dump. Small Time Crooks was a passable diversion, but it was rather shrill, overly simplistic and just plain dumb for a Woody Allen comedy. Even in his early, "silly" work (like Bananas or Take the Money and Run or Love and Death), there's a verbal sophistication and wit on display that elevates it above the level of broad slapsticky farce.

But Crooks really lacked anything high-minded or redeeming. It was a string of gags, some successful but most not. And things only got worse from there...far worse. 2001's Curse of the Jade Scorpion is a complete disaster, a shockingly unfunny slog through old-fashioned farcical tropes that never comes alive for one moment. 2002's Hollywood Ending was similarly disappointing, a one-joke premise painfully stretched into a full-length feature. And let's not even delve into the abysmal Anything Else, a so-called "return to form" that found Woody aping his previous style with a complete tin ear for dialogue and some of the most atrocious miscasting of this young century. (Jason Biggs as a jazz-loving comedy writer? Is he serious?)



So the statement that Melinda and Melinda far outclasses Woody's recent output doesn't really say all that much. I'll add on that the film, though flawed, contains some of Allen's most human, layered, complex and punchy dialogue since Deconstructing Harry, and that his lascerating sarcastic side seems to have thankfully returned. As well, the film's expertly cast, a nice change from some of the B-level talent gracing his recent films.

Whereas Hollywood Ending boasted an ensemble featuring Treat Williams, George Hamilton, Debra Messing, Isaac Mizrahi and Tiffani Amber Theissen, here Woody gets the pleasure of working with Radha Mitchell (in her best role to date), Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor (who was so marvelous in Stephen Frears terrific Dirty Pretty Things), Johnny Lee Miller and Wallace Shawn. That's more like it.

And he's finally working with an interesting premise again. Instead of the high-concept mush of his recent scripts, Melinda and Melinda begins with an intriguing puzzle. That the same story be fashioned into either a comedy or a tragedy, depending on the perspective of the person telling the story.

To illustrate this point, Allen gives us two similar stories starring the same lead character, a troubled young woman named Melinda (Mitchell), piecing her life back together after barely escaping a marriage gone sour. The film opens in a cafe in Paris, where two playwrights argue about the best way to frame the supposedly true story of Melinda and the effect she had on a circle of friends.

The comic playwright (Shawn) turns the story into a romantic and darkly comic twist on last year's Closer. A clueless husband is played expertly by Will Ferrell, who combines his own hulking physicality with Allen's sputtering vocal mannerisms. It doesn't hurt that he gets most of the film's truly great lines. He's drawn to Melinda when his wife (Amanda Peet) becomes cold and distant, but by the time he figures out how he really feels, Melinda's moved on and dating a slick dentist (Josh Brolin, in an amusing cameo performance).

In the tragic playwright's version, Melinda romances a suave struggling musician (Ejiofor), only to have her new relationship turn out as ugly and painful as the one she's escaping.

Before I say anything else, I have to acknowledge the luminous cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. This guy is a legend for a reason. It's another Woody Allen film made in New York, and the city in autumn absolutely sparkles in the movie. There's one long shot where Mitchell and Brooke Smith stroll down the street past shops and cafes, chatting, that is absolutely classic Woody Allen. One is reminded of the iconic New York imagery of Annie Hall and Manhattan.

Still, this is pretty difficult material with a lot of obstacles to overcome. Since Allen tells both stories within the context of one 90 minute movie, we don't spend nearly as much time with any one set of characters as we otherwise would in a feature film, and sometimes there are large gaps in the storytelling or relationships that could be better fleshed out. Allen makes a few half-hearted attempts to link the two narratives, like giving one character a line in one story that another character says in the other. But he doesn't go nearly far enough with this concept to make it pay off, and the "links" wind up feeling like a distraction.

More troublesome, I think, is Allen's overall method for the film. He spends significantly more time with the "tragic" storyline, and it's not terribly difficult to see why. Though Ferrell's a joy to watch, the comic story never really gathers any momentum. It's fairly obvious the whole time that Melinda and Ferrell's goofball are meant to be together, and the extenuating circumstnaces begin to feel like so much fluffy romantic comedy padding.

The tragic story, however, gathers momentum as it goes along, building to an effective, melancholy conclusion. Mitchell clearly has more of a feel for the tragic Melinda than the comic, and she delivers some very labored monologues with aplomb.

But the biggest problem with the premise as carried out by Allen is that it's quite simply dishonest. He opens with a question - could the same story, if told in two different ways, be either funny or tragic? But in answering the question, he proceeds to tell two significantly different narratives. The idea is presented as being one of outlook - if someone with a generally optimistic or humorous nature heard the story of Melinda, he's write a comedy of manners with a happy ending, while a pessimisitc or downbeat person would hear the same story and write a tragedy ending in hopeless despair.

But Allen changes the story to suit his purpose. For example, the "comedy" Melinda has gone through a painful divorce, but has never had any children. The "tragic" Melinda had two kids with her ex-husband, and because of her philandering ways, she has lost custody of them both. So, clearly, this is a circumstance out of the control of the character that effects how her story would be told. Obviously, a mother losing her children in a bitter custody battle is more tragic than a woman getting over a painful divorce.

So the movie kind of has no point. I mean, obviously you can start with the same premise - a troubled woman invades the dinner party, and then lives, of a few assembled couples - and derive two different stories. That's the nature of creativity and imagination. But could you take the same story and make it funny or sad? That's a question the Allen film never bothers to answer, and it's supposed to be the central question.

Allen wraps up the film back at that French cafe, where the writers eventually agree that life contains elements of both comedy and tragedy. It's kind of an unsatisfying conclusion. You would hope that Woody Allen, America's greatest living comic filmmaker who is also famous for a variety of superlative dramatic films, would have more insight into the divide between the two genres. This is the guy who made both Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors, both Sleeper and Husbands and Wives, both Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and Her Sisters. How can the depth of his insight be limited to an acknowledgement of the utility of both comedy and drama?

If it sounds like I'm being too hard on the film, maybe I am. Maybe I expect too much from Woody Allen because he's made some of my favorite movies. And, full disclosure, this story hits rather close to home for me. I've written a script with a very similar character to Melinda, based in part on a real girl I once knew...named Melinda. But still, if you're going to open a movie with this kind of premise, it's best to follow through in some small way, if at all possible. And reconfiguring his two stories in such extreme ways kind of made me question why Allen even bothered structuring his film this way.

I think a straight-ahead drama about Melinda could have been a tremendously moving and effective film, and a comedy about Melinda would have at least been Woody's most entertaining venture in recent memory. As it is, the combination of both left me excited to see one of my favorite filmmakers getting some of his mojo back and disappointed that even now he seems incapable of pulling out another masterpiece.