Woody Allen's movies run the entire gamut from extraordinary to abysmal. "Melinda and Melinda" leans more toward the former than the latter, but it doesn't quite reach a truly outstanding level.
"Melinda" is really two movies in one. In predictable Woody Allen style, it opens with four articulate New Yorkers wining and dining as they debate over whether life is comedy or tragedy. One starts to exposit a scenario where a woman, the titular Melinda (Radha Mitchell), crashes a friend's dinner party, and then he asks the rest of the table whether the scenario is comic or tragic. The movie is henceforth bifurcated between two lines of narration and two separate casts, with Melinda as a hinge. On one side of the line, there lies tragedy; on the other, comedy.
The tragic Melinda has endured a failed marriage, a custody struggle and a stay at a mental institution. Laurel (Chlo Sevigny), the friend throwing the aforementioned dinner party, supports Melinda even as she wades through her own troubled marriage.
Enter Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a modestly successful musician whose apartment somehow contains a full view of the Empire State Building. (the New York Times' A.O. Scott has called Allen a pornographer when it comes to real estate.) Melinda and Ellis start dating, seeing themselves as passionate individuals who are misunderstood by the rest of society. Yet as is the case in many of Allen's movies, attraction is as indiscriminate as the wind, and Ellis and Laurel eventually fall in love behind Melinda's back.
The comic Melinda also has a tumultuous past, although the circumstances are not quite as dark. Struggling actor Hobie (Will Ferrell) eventually falls in love with Melinda, but even after he is freed from his unhappy marriage with Susan (Amanda Peet), he finds himself vying for Melinda's affections with a character much like Ellis.
Of course, the audience shouldn't really worry, since nearly everyone has slept with each other by the end of the movie.
Woody Allen refrains from putting himself in "Melinda," which helps the film immensely. Unfortunately, he uses Ferrell as a proxy through which he can funnel his particular brand of neuroticism. The oafish Ferrell is nothing like Allen, and the result is a character that is alternately lovable and wholly ignorable.
Allen at least makes handsome films. His Manhattan is a fantastic creation of his own, full of dimly-lit restaurants where patrons drink wine all night and out-of-work actors can magically afford to live in the world's most expensive neighborhoods.
As usual with Allen, this is a decidedly chatty film. Sometimes, the dialogue works, such as when Melinda realizes that she has been worn down by her own impossible standards, saying "I've learned that it's only about what you touch and what touches you."
This movie is also proof that Woody's "Allen-isms" can be funny when they don't come out of his own mouth. The one-liners in this movie are frequently hilarious, like when Susan says that her feminist play will be entitled "The Castration Sonata" or when we discover that Melinda's ex-husband hired a PI "by the unlikely name of Woodcrotch."
Yet the dialogue is not always so intriguing, with the interlocutors in the restaurant scenes coming off as Fine Arts majors who enjoy hearing themselves speak more than they actually care about the subject of discussion.
"Melinda" suffers most from a dragging plot. With countless personal problems and at least eight separate relationships spread out among the movie's dozen or so major characters, the audience doesn't really get attached to anyone and develops a distinct feeling of being knocked around aimlessly.
In short, Allen's newest is just a shapeless grab bag of profound lines and witty one-liners. The film certainly makes you think, but ultimately, it fails to make you feel anything genuine.
