Melinda Melinda Release Date: March 18, 2005 Starring: Jonny Lee Miller, Wallace Shawn, Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Josh Brolin, Brooke Smith, Zak Orth, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Larry Pine, Vinessa Shaw, Shalom Harlow, Amanda Peet, Radha Mitchell Directed by: Woody Allen GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/17/05)
Though artists need to impose some kind of discipline on themselves in order to actually produce, emulating an assembly line doesn’t usually pay such terrific dividends in practice. John Updike’s resolve to turn out a book every year has been providing alarmingly diminishing returns for both reviewers and readers; Woody Allen’s similarly clockwork-style fecundity has been filling his following with a kind of low-level dread for almost a decade. Despite the low-key pleasures offered by the likes of a Sweet and Lowdown, the advent of a new Allen film generally leads one to wonder how dated the jokes are going to be, which embarrassingly age-inappropriate starlet Allen’s going to romance if he’s appearing in the film, and so on. Such musings rather unfairly wipe out the fact that the director has gotten some minor payoffs through nursing various out-of-left-field conceits in this latter portion of his career, as in the quasi-musical-with-non-singers Everyone Says I Love You and the ultra-meta Deconstructing Harry. Mixed works, true, but not without their pleasures. Even a sour dud like 2003’s Anything Else proved of interest in that there Allen cast himself as a character not too far off from “one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag, screaming about socialism,” Alvy Singer’s anti-model of his old-man self in Annie Hall. It proved of interest to Allenphiles, that is. Not too many other people much cared.
To state that Allen’s latest, Melinda and Melinda, represents something of a return to form for Allen is to bring both good news and not-so-good news. The structural hook of the film, which reintroduces a theme that Allen’s been grappling with since Annie Hall, is a bit facile: At a restaurant one evening, some dude who’s dining with a pair of renowned writers (played by Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn) relates an anecdote and asks the pair—one a specialist in drama, the other in comedy—whether the story—which we never hear in its original form, but which begins with an alarmingly disoriented woman interrupting a dinner party—is the stuff of tragedy or yuks.
The woman, Melinda, is played by Radha Mitchell in both the comic and the tragic milieus, wherein she is surrounded by two discrete sets of characters and cast members, most notably Chloë Sevigny in the not-cheery tale, a Chekhov-inflected riff on alliances and betrayals, and Will Ferrell in the zany story, a more overtly Allenesque take on frustrated desire and misplaced guilt. Once the clumsy setups for the stories are dispensed with, the movie builds up a very good head of steam. Writer-director Allen keeps things moving quite adeptly, and as both Melindas, Mitchell is so spectacular that she’s able to completely transcend the fact that the character as written is merely another slight variation of the psycho-beauty Allen’s been trotting out for show since Stardust Memories. That’s part of the bad news—return to form is as return to form does, and it’s hardly a surprise that these characters appear to be living in New York circa 1986 (when Allen made Hannah and Her Sisters, his last metropolitan foray that seemed true to its time). When was the last time you heard of someone arranging dates through “personal ads” rather than the Internet, to give one example. On the better side of return-to-form, Allen tells funnier jokes here, and in the absolutely hilarious Ferrell he’s found the best Woody-surrogate since John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway. Though Melinda is no masterpiece, it’s also an Allen film that requires almost zero special pleading.
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