Melinda and Melinda - Irish Film Festival

The funny thing about Woody Allen is that his films tend to be quite similar. The HILARIOUS thing about Woody Allen is that his films tend to be quite good! Granted, Melinda and Melinda is no Annie Hall – but then again, what IS, people? It was a perfectly serviceable movie, fluffy and romantic followed by ironic and ‘tragic’ – well, in reality, the tragic elements weren’t very intense, so it was more akin to a riff on some Greek tragedy, a lá Mighty Aphrodite.

The film starts out with four people sitting in a busy bistro in – let’s just make an almighty assumption here, what with it being a Woody Allen movie – New York, discussing whether life is a tragedy or a comedy. Two of the men are playwrights and one writes purely tragedy, but believes life is comedy, and the other is the exact opposite. One of their life-discussion/party mentions a story of a woman bursting in on a dinner party, and the two men decide to give examples of how the story can be made comic or tragic. So follows the story – Radha Mitchell playing the titular Melinda, in one scenario as the comedic downstairs ‘personality’ who Will Ferrell falls in love with, despite being married to Amanda Peet. Incidentally, she has a neurosis about lovemaking (notice an Allen-movie pattern?) and Will Ferrell basically plays Woody Allen – all twitching and funny and pass-remarkable! It is amusing to watch, but there is that niggling part of your brain that says ‘why can’t Woody Allen write a movie that doesn’t contain a jazz-loving, wise-cracking, neurotic New Yorker’?

Anyway, the fact that Mr. Ferrell is pretty much the anti-hero of the piece doesn’t slow his satisfaction – he relishes every moment on screen and, though I worried about his capabilities whilst under the straining whip of Allen and his punctuation, he has magnificently embraced his character. Amanda Peet plays a fabulously self-obsessed director, and falls in line with most of the women in the play – intelligent and ‘kooky’, but still driven by baser instinct at the end of it all. Radha Mitchell is eminently likable as Melinda in the comedy, where she is simply a free spirit. In the tragedy, however, she is a free spirit struggling through the mire for air, weighed down by past mistakes, present regrets and a whole host of wines and cigarettes.

Chloe Sevigny is distasteful as the Park Avenue hostess with a passion for music – she is un-likable, weedy and uninteresting…yet she holds Melinda’s fate in her hands. Such strange situations life throws at us – and I guess the tragedy for Woody Allen IS that sometimes our life balance is held in the shaky hands of a moron. Her bow-tied marriage is falling apart, and into her life stumbles the wrecked shell of Melinda – a friend from the past. Initially the Park Avenue princesses try to help in their own upper-class way, but when Melinda truly has a chance at happiness – with a man of unlikely name, Ellis Moonsong – the very people who proffered her help threaten it’s continuance.

The welcome retreat of the comedy softens the blow of the tragedy but, as I have said before, the tragedy is much too dramatically operatic to be of any real threat to your peace of mind. It actually gets to the stage where you wish Woody Allen had just left the tragedy out of the story altogether, and focused completely on the much more entertaining comedy. What is interesting is the premise – one woman, Miranda, and two possibilities of her life.

Though by no means his greatest movie, Woody Allen has taken us to that bistro in New York with those pretentious writers, and allowed us all to sit at the fork in the road of Robert Frost’s poem and gaze upon the possibilities.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”