Woody Allen, in his new dramedy Melinda and Melinda, succeeds in bettering his recent movies, but that's not saying much.
The film opens in a New York City cafe on a rainy night, as two playwrights pretentiously discuss life and the nature of comedy and tragedy over what is presumably petit fours and espresso. "But life is comedy," one cries. "No, no, my artsy comrade, life is tragedy," his friend rejoins eagerly. Ah yes, Woody, you get deeper with age, and by deeper we mean much, much more obvious.
The competing playwrights tell their respective versions of a single story, each turning his into either a comedy or a tragedy. These two semi-parallel stories compose the film, and the plotline jumps back and forth between them.
In the comedy, Will Ferrell plays an out of work actor. Or, more precisely, he plays the hackneyed-neurotic-Woody Allen character who hates not so much the beach but the sand, the ocean and the seagulls. In the tragedy, Chlo? Sevigny looks hot.
What results is an emotionally empty treatise on the power of art. Meanwhile, stock characters like the Park Avenue Princess and the Has-been Actor listen to Stravinsky and comment on how much they want to jump each other's wives.
And overall, there's definitely far too much Melinda (Radha Mitchell), the only character in both stories. Now the title makes sense! Get it? The title?
