MELINDA AND MELINDA
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten Fox Searchlight Pictures Grade: B Directed by: Woody Allen Written by: Woody Allen Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Jonny Lee Miller, Radha Mitchell, Amanda Peet, Chloe Sevigny, Wallace Shawn Screened at: Fox, NYC, 3/15/05
Life is fragile. "You can go just like that," snaps a playwright played by Wallace Shawn in a scene that forms a frame to Woody Allen's latest movie, "So you might as well enjoy it." It should easy to enjoy life is you have the kind of money, sophistication and talent embraced by a large number of characters in "Melinda and Melinda," but somehow, though for the most part they live in spacious Manhattan apartments in the trendiest sections of the island, they're often miserable. They find solace in having affairs with people who may be suave but who are obviously not for them, at least not for a permanent relationship.
Allen, like all writer-directors, is a storyteller, a great one in a large number of his 40-odd contributions to cinema. This time, however, he has two of his personalities tell the story of a pretty, sophisticated, and neurotic woman named Melinda. The playwright who specializes in comedies sits with his three pals around a table in a French restaurant (filmed in the meat- packing district of Manhattan) while the writer who believes that tragedy is life's predominant characteristic (Larry Pine) tells his story as though it were a tragedy. Woody Allen does not unfold the two tales in the more obvious way, the comic following the tragic, but merges the two (that of the tragic Melinda and that of the comic woman) into a unified whole. This is both the script's claim to fame and its major difficulty in that it takes real talent to put together a tale in this manner while at the same time the technique could easily confuse an audience which sees the titled personality in separate situations as though they were of one piece. Moreover the mise-en-scenes are so similar that we wonder whether Melinda is going through her tragic phase or one that we can laugh at.
As Sy (Wallace Shawn) and Max (Larry Pine) unfold their takes on whether life is comic or tragic and absurdist during a three- hour dinner, we in the movie audience focus on Melinda (Radha Mitchell), who in the tragic version has barged in uninvited on a friend she knew from college days who have just sat down to dinner. She talks nonstop about herself and her miserable life to the dismay of her hosts Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) and Lee's wife Laurel (Chloe Sevigny). Laurel is one of the ladies-who-lunch, teaching music part time, while her husband, Lee, is a regularly unemployed actor. Their marriage is on its last legs.
In the comic version, Melinda barges in a another out-of-work actor, Hobie (Will Ferrell–as though he could ever be out of work) and his wife Susan (Amanda Peet), a producer who is buttering up a financier to get her movie started.
In both versions, Melinda, in want of male companionship for her passionate personality, is fixed-up by her friends, in one case with a dentist who drives a Bentley and has a veritable castle in the Hamptons, Greg (Josh Brolin), while in the other version her friend Cassie (Brooke Smith) arranges a meeting for Melinda with a more prosaic type of dentist, one of the few people in the story with their feet on the ground. On her own Melinda hooks up with a smooth-talking, opera-composing pianist, Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who plays Bach magnificently.
"Melinda and Melinda" takes us into a Manhattan which is artificial, thankfully so, or quite a few people in the audience would become depressed and envious that they could not "make it" the way these people, however unhappy, have done. This is a Manhattan without subways or traffic tie-ups, without poverty or two-by-four apartments with view of brick walls. We like to think that if we had the money, the charm, the looks of any of these folks we'd be a lot happier. Yet because of the tensions in their lives, they find themselves either falling into bed with people other than their husbands–in one case getting a hugely comic reaction from Hobie as the cuckolded husband of Susan–or threatening to jump out of windows.
Woody Allen has come a ways since his far less complex films such as "Bananas" (his 1971 comedy that has Woody involved in a Mexican revolution) and "Take the Money and Run" (his first film as a writer, director and star–about a compulsive thief). In those episodes we enjoyed a nonstop parade of jokes. "Melinda and Melinda" is a comedy in a truer sense, that is, not a sitcom with some jokes that work and others that do not. At the same time it is not a tragedy or even Chekhovian, insofar as true tragedies involve people of heroic dimension and Chekhov's works deal with people, unlike these Manhattanites, who are imprisoned by history and tradition. This is a fleshed- out piece of motion picture-making with a complex plot and character who are trying their best, sometimes at the point of suicide, to have some enjoyment in this brief life. And the trendy areas of Manhattan from SoHo to the Meat Packing district to the Upper East Side never looked better.
Rated PG-13. 99 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten harveycritic@cs.com
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