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Woody Allen tells tales of two Melindas

It may be the same story for the most part — smart, neurotic, sort-of-young New Yorkers fretting about careers and relationships, wrestling with instability, staying or not staying together and sleeping in the wrong beds.

But Woody Allen can always find a new way to tell it.

Fox Searchlight Pictures 'Melinda and Melinda' B 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

Melinda and Melinda, the soon to be 70-year-old director's 30th-something feature, isn't one of his masterpieces. It is a reasonably entertaining outing with people who can't find more than temporary satisfaction as they strive for more.

The Melinda of the title is no everywoman. She's more of a theoretical catalyst or wild card summoned from the collective imaginations of a group of friends who are having dinner out one night. One's a playwright who writes comedies and believes life is essentially comic. Another pens tragedies and holds the opposing view.

Given the same situation, which involves a pretty, unattached woman named Melinda showing up on the doorstep of some former friends, they spin and embellish contrasting versions of what then takes place.

Most of the film is taken up with enactments of those accounts, which are played out like a separate film or play by those who take Melinda in and introduce her to their friends. She's played by Radha Mitchell in both narratives, which alternate.

One story, initiated to vintage swing music, is comic. That becomes more than obvious as Will Ferrell, as a sweet bumbler so smitten with Melinda that he doesn't care when his wife (Amanda Peet) dumps him, delivers a steady stream of the kind of lines Allen used to deliver far more convincingly to the camera.

The other is tragic, sort of. We know that from the Stravinsky and Bartok in the score, but also because it almost drives Melinda to suicide when the composer she's seeing, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things), drops her for mousy and married Laurel (Chloe Sevigny). That's almost a rerun of the situation that brought Melinda to Laurel's door in the first place.

But it isn't all that affecting here, especially in light of the disappointing trend of the two stories to blur without ever merging. Melinda and Melinda is saved by the humor that bubbles in it. That's Allen's perpetual fountain.