Melinda and Melinda, Woody Allen's fine new film, almost professes suffer from multiple-personality disorder. In reality, the movie is simply consistently enjoyable.
The film opens with a pair of playwrights arguing in a restaurant over whether or not life is essentially comic or tragic. One member of the dinner party offers an example scenario for them to analyze. The comedian, ironically, sees the makings of a wonderful tragedy, while the tragedian sees a nice comedy.
Allen proceeds to jump back and forth between the stories of two iterations of Melinda (Radha Mitchell, last seen in Finding Neverland), a beautiful young lady with a troubled past and some problems with living, who walks in on a dinner party, located unsurprisingly in Manhattan. In the tragic tale, Melinda intrudes on the lives of her old best friends Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and Cassie (Brooke Smith) and Laurel's actor husband (Jonny Lee Miller). In the comic tale, she ruins the party of complete strangers, and Susan (Amanda Peet) attempts to woo the wealthy Steve into funding her new movie The Castration Sonata. In both versions, Melinda's friends try to find her a stable relationship, while in the comic version Peet's husband Hobie (Will Ferrell) falls in love with Melinda.
Woody Allen's older works typically have a stand-in Woody Allen-type character. In this case, Ferrell gets most of the hilarious one-line zingers?"A dentist is the same thing, only oral"?but the character closest to Allen's type may actually be the neurotic and troubled Melinda. In any case, even if all of the characters contain elements of their writer's personality, the film is sharp, funny, and truthful.
Allen has a fine cast here. Mitchell handles the biggest role of her career with aplomb, while Ferrell and Chiewetel Ejiofor plays tragic Melinda's latest love, the elegant composer Ellis Moonsong, compete to steal the movie. Sevigny and Smith are also excellent, but Peet has been better (see The Whole Nine Yards).
Although Allen switches back and forth between the comedy and tragedy and only rarely returns to our dining storytellers, it is not terribly difficult to distinguish between the tales. Yes, Melinda is set up to meet a rich dentist in both stories, but her fellow characters appear individually in only one scenario. If you're worried, just memorize her hairstyles. Similarities between the comedy and tragedy illustrate one of the messages of the film: whether life is comedy or tragedy is simply a matter of perspective.
Because Allen has separated out the comedy and the tragedy in Melinda's story, the comedy is perhaps atypically light for Allen while the tragedy is strikingly bleak, as Melinda is unfunnily compulsively suicidal. Left alone, the tragedy probably wouldn't work, but intertwined with a delightful comedy, it richens Allen's film into something you could go away pondering for a while. But most of all, Melinda and Melinda is a cleverly-directed pleasure.