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Woody Allen returns to form with 'Melinda and Melinda'

By Chris Garcia
Austin American-Statesman

"Melinda and Melinda" marks a minor milestone for Woody Allen: It's his second watchable movie in a row.

At the pace Allen works — a film a year, and he's already wrapped one more — there are bound to be stinkers. But the stinkers during the past half dozen years have been especially fetid — slight, sloppy and witless larks whose incompetence was baffling from Allen.

Fox Searchlight Pictures 'Melinda and Melinda' 3 out of 5 stars Director: Woody Allen Starring: Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell, Neil Pepe, Stephanie Roth Haberle, Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn Run time: 100 minutes Release date: March 18, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for adult situations involving sexuality and some substance material See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer   -- Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Melinda and Melinda"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

I might have been the only critic who enjoyed his last effort, "Anything Else," an "Annie Hall" redux played out by Christina Ricci and Jason Biggs, who mimicked Allen's trademark tics. A trifecta of horrible movies preceded that — "Hollywood Ending," "Small Time Crooks" and "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" — comedies so flaccid and poorly crafted, you wondered if Allen had succumbed to dementia.

"Melinda and Melinda" is more than a relief; it's a funny, thoughtful, axiom-littered dramedy that mingles the best parts of the interpersonal drama and neurotic comedy Allen so nimbly managed in "Manhattan," "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Husbands and Wives." It in fact slices down the middle of these dual styles, playing the story of Melinda in two versions — one as a drama, one as a comedy — side by side.

The film opens with a clutch of friends (intellectual, artistic, well-heeled Manhattanites, of course) discussing the nature of comedy and tragedy, and how any narrative situation includes elements of both, yet only becomes one or the other in the way you tell the story. The conversation launches us into two versions of the story of Melinda (Radha Mitchell — excellent), a distraught single woman in her 30s who crashes the dinner party of her old college mates. From there, Melinda's entrancing presence sets off a firecracker-string of relationship events, including Allen's favorites: infidelity, stale, sexless marriages, jealousy, disloyalty and other merry stuff.

Allen has increasingly relied on hokey and contrived setups like this, and at first the dual-story construction feels precious and labored. But once the awkwardness burns off, both versions unfurl gracefully, compellingly. Though most viewers will likely favor the comedy version, in which Will Ferrell assumes the traditional, bumbling Woody role — he's all hand-wringing hostility and nervous sarcasm — the dramatic telling, starring Chlo Sevigny, keeps you in its prickly, downbeat thrall.

Mitchell deftly portrays the two Melindas, recalling Cate Blanchett's recent twin performances as opposite cousins in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes." The comedic Melinda is a boozy pill-popper, loopy and unstable. She seems to channel the dreamy haze that the young Jessica Lange drifted in, donning a wobbly, woozy grin. The dramatic Melinda also has a dark and gnarled past, but she is luckless in love and snared in a torturous custody battle.

As usual, Allen has put together a pair of powerful acting ensembles that include Amanda Peet, Zak Orth, Brooke Smith, Jonny Lee Miller and an amusing Josh Brolin. Conspicuously featured are two African American characters of substance (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Daniel Sunjata), a first for Allen and conceivably a sop for critics who have blasted the white, upper-class homogeneity of his casts.

The conversations are rarefied, the references high-falutin', as in all of Allen's films. His cerebral New Yorkers listen expressly to jazz and classical music. They indulge in intellectual name-dropping and quote Chekov and Cole Porter. This Allen proclivity I used to find flattering. Now it's lumpy and heavyhanded.

Shot in the brown and amber tones Allen has opted for since 1989's "Crimes and Misdemeanors," the movie is a return to the well-rehearsed control of Allen's better work. There is nothing haphazard here. Scenes are toned and scripted, the takes long and silky, at times beautiful.

The themes are ones that have obsessed the director since "Love and Death" in 1975. The meaninglessness of existence, the frailty of relationships, the impossibility of enduring love, the pain and bleakness of life — all of it is thickly present. But resignation and acceptance tinge the pessimism, unlike the cynicism of earlier films, in which the bad news was cause for angst. Characters begin maximlike sentences with "Life ...," such as, "Life is messy" and "Life has a malicious way of dealing with great potential." This, it appears, is what Woody Allen has learned in the course of his 69 years and dozens of films.

He has also learned this, spoken by lispy Wallace Shawn in the film: "We laugh because it masks the terror of our mortality."

What isn't spoken is something Allen demonstrably believes and which applies to his fine new movie: Sometimes we laugh just because it's funny.