Eclectica

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Film - Melinda and Melinda

The thing with Woody Allen is that he doesn’t seem able to help himself. Every twelve months, come rain or shine, he produces a film. You can set your cinematic watch by him and, inevitably, he has begun to hit diminishing returns in recent years. Anything Else, marketed in the US as a teen comedy with nary a hint of Allen’s name in the publicity, was a painful misfire that went on too long and merely reminded you how good he used to be. Hollywood Ending didn’t even see the inside of most UK Blockbusters let alone multiplexes. You have to go back to Bullets Over Broadway to find his last truly great film. Happy to say, though, that Melinda and Melinda, while not up there with the greatest Allen creations, is definitely a very good film, far better than last year’s effort.

The premise is an intruiging one – take a dinner party anecdote and mine it simultaneously for both its tragic and comic possibilities. We open in familiar Allen territory (every review of an Allen film has to contain the phrase ‘familiar Allen territory’, it’s in the Critics’ Guild rules or something) with a group of well off New York intellectuals discussing the philosophy of life over dinner. Two writers, one a successful comedy writer, one a tragedian, present their separate takes on a story given to them by a fellow diner. The film then interweaves the two variant takes on the story of a woman called Melinda, and pursues them to both their tragic and comic conclusions.

First off the weaknesses. Why is it that actors who play the Allen-analogue part in his films so often end up doing bad impersonations of Allen himself, and why doesn’t he tell them to damn well cut it out? Jason Biggs and Kenneth Branagh have fallen into that trap and now, annoyingly, Will Ferrell does too. There are certain lines that are flat out impersonation. Perhaps it’s the way the dialogue is written. Allen’s authorial voice and his familiar way with dialogue is so imprinted into the minds of every actor that they just can’t help themselves. ‘Those words sound like Allen, I must say them like Allen’. It’s almost Pavlovian. This is especially annoying as Ferrell is very good in the role – although perhaps a bit too hammy on occasion – but his regular Allenisms jar you out of the scene and remind you of what and who you’re watching.

Another problem is the bookend scenes. The opening one is a very stark laying out of the film’s premise, and that’s fine. It’s a bit obvious but it’s not a big problem. However, the final scene, where the diners carefully explain to us the point of the film we’ve just seen, is just irritating. Thanks Woody, we got it, you can shut up now.

Those two caveats aside, the main body of the film is engaging, well performed, cleverly constructed and both tragic and comic as befits its objectives.

The film’s greatest asset is Radha Mitchell – the heroine they inexplicably killed off at the end of Pitch Black, prefering instead to focus on Vin Diesel. Big mistake. She is flat out superb here. She plays the comedy with timing and grace, and the tragedy with twitchy, neurotic, unsettling energy. As the only actress to appear in both comic and tragic strands, she effectively carries the film, and she makes the weight seem entirely negligible.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, from Dirty Pretty Things, also impresses, with a poetic performance of quiet strength and great magnetism. In fact all of the cast are clearly relishing the chance to get to grips with a meaty script and act their socks off. This is not uncommon in Allen’s films – actors love working with him and he always gets the best out of them.

The script for the tragic section is the most engaging. The comic sections are very familiar indeed, with the focus on dissatisfied lovers in New York lofts bringing out all of Allen’s trademark gags. That’s not to say it’s not funny, in fact it occasionally borders on hilarious, just that it’s not surprising. The tragic elements, though, are. Of course Allen has ventured into more sombre territory before, with September and Another Woman, but it’s a side of him we see less of, so it’s a pleasant surprise that he conjurs a downbeat narrative so convincingly. Also, he’s not so involved in his dialectic that he doesn’t realise that the comedy must contain moments of tragedy, and vice versa.

In fact, obviously, that is the point of the film. The two are inextricably linked, as any ancient Greek you happen to bump into will tell you, and the film demonstrates how any given incident or relationship contains both comedy and tragedy simultaneously. As, of course, does life itself. The message of the film – that life is what you make it, that you can chose to be either in a comedy or a tragedy as you see fit, is, as I already mentioned, spelled out a little too obviously at the end, but it’s potently expressed through this enjoyable and intelligent film.

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