Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Melinda and Melinda was the fourth misfire in a row for Woody Allen in the early 2000s and even his most loyal fans were left thinking by this stage that his time was up. It is a film that has few redeeming features and is one of Allen's least engaging works. Its main problem is that it takes a pretty facile concept and fails to develop this into anything meaningful or entertaining. In fact it is bland beyond belief. Here, Woody Allen is on autopilot, half-heartedly churning out yet another routine comedy-drama, recycling ideas from previous movies without even trying to offer anything fresh and original. The film starts with a question: is life comic or is it tragic?  It's hardly a revelatory moment for Allen - most of his films combine elements of tragedy and comedy - and the idea that a group of intellectuals (in the film's opening scene) would make a big deal over such a non-subject is fatuous in the extreme. But Allen takes the subject seriously, seriously enough to squander several months of his life making a 100 minute feature to help us decide whether life should make us weep or laugh. The film ends up causing us to do neither. It merely bores.

Crass and naive as the premise is, you can well imagine the younger Woody Allen making something of it, interweaving two wildly contrasting stories - one a full-blown tragedy in respectful homage to his hero Ingmar Bergman, the other a wild Marx Brothers-like farce. Towards the end of the film, Allen might have arranged things so that the distinction between the two approaches is less apparent, and they might even switch over, so that the tragedy becomes comedy, and vice versa. Melinda and Melinda offers nothing so delightfully blatant as this. In fact, it is so subtle in its delineation of comedy and tragedy that you can hardly tell the one from the other - and this is the film's most frustrating aspect. It's not even bothering to address the point which sets it in motion. It merely conflates two dull and unimaginative comedy-dramas and expects the audience to identify which is the comedy and which is the tragedy - a pretty pointless con as it is clear right from the outset that neither epithet applies to either of the two intercut stories.

It's not just the concept that is skew-whiff, the entire film seems to be lost at sea. The smattering of humour that Allen deigns to offers us is so forced as to be more cringeworthy than funny, and, for the most part, the performances are so bland and uninteresting as to leave you totally unmoved. The only cast member who has any impact is Chiwetel Ejiofor - he appears in just a few scenes (the best one being with Chloë Sevigny) but these are the only ones likely to stick in your memory. The rest of the cast appear to have given up on the meandering second-rate script and it is painful to watch Will Ferrell's attempted impersonation of Woody Allen, killing stone dead every last ounce of humour that Allen wrote for him with his Disney-style delivery.

Lacking both a decent premise and the will to carry through even an ill-conceived premise, Melinda and Melinda flounders like a stranded whale and never seems to get going. You spend an hour and half waiting for the film to come to life but it never does. And when it ends, suddenly, you are left feeling that you have spent all this time staring at a blank screen. It's a film that Allen should have abandoned at the drawing board, and the fact that he didn't do this but instead doggedly persevered to try to animate the most still-born of projects leaves you wondering if he hasn't completely lost touch with reality. Of course, this wasn't the end of Woody Allen, and within next to no time his career would be on the up again, following his timely and incredibly fruitful relocation to Europe, the place where he is most adored.

Film Synopsis

Whilst dining out with friends in a Manhattan restaurant, two playwrights get into an argument over whether life is most naturally tragic or comic. One of the friends tells an anecdote and invites the playwrights to decide whether it is tragic or comic. Two versions of the story begin to take shape in the minds of the playwrights, both having the same starting point - an unstable young woman named Melinda turning up unexpectedly at a dinner party. In the tragic version of the story, the relationship of struggling actor Lee and his breadwinner wife Laurel comes under strain when they have to accommodate the depressive Melinda in the apartment they can barely afford. Under Melinda's influence, Laurel falls for an attractive composer and is then shocked to discover that Lee has been unfaithful to her. In the comic telling of the same tale, Melinda's appearance has an equally disruptive effect on the domestic life of aspiring film director Susan and her out-of-work actor partner Hobie. Susan has all but given up on her marriage, but Hobie doesn't yet realise this as he falls madly in love with Melinda.