| THE COMIC TRAGEDIANS : Woody Allen's 'Melinda and Melinda' [6/10] |
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| Tuesday, 05 July 2005 | |
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Continuing his long, steady, depressing decline, Allen's latest is very much the same-old, same-old. We begin with the usual Allenish bunch of Manhattan intellectuals sitting in the usual Allenish cafe discussing whether life is fundamentally comic or tragic. We then see two stories which supposedly 'illustrate' and 'explore' this specious dichotomy. What follows is something of an actors' exercise for Australian starlet Radha Mitchell, who gets to show her range by playing both 'Melindas'. I cycled some 16 miles from Sunderland to Newcastle on a warmish July afternoon to see The Edukators at the Tyneside Cinema - only to find, on my sweaty arrival, that I'd got the timings wrong. The choice: return home filmless, or take a chance on Melinda and Melinda which was starting in half an hour. I hadn't been especially keen to catch Melinda after reading the reviews: although Woody Allen has been responsible for some of my favourite films over the years, including Annie Hall, Stardust Memories and, to a lesser extent Play It Again Sam (which he wrote but didn't direct), I hadn't seen a particularly memorable picture by him since the days Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). In the intervening decade, he's cranked out so-so film after so-so film every year* - to the point that his UK distributors have struggled to keep up. As far as I know, Hollywood Ending hasn't been released here at all, and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion came and went very quickly. Though praised in many quarters as a return to form, Melinda was a long way from the top of my must-see list of current releases - and it's unlikely I would have caught it at all if fate and sloppy planning hadn't conspired in this specific way. In one (dark) strand she's a pill-popping bundle of jagged neuroses, seemingly stuck in a cycle of ill-advised romances and teetering on the brink of suicide. In the other (light) narrative she's a ditzy Annie Hall figure with whom her unhappily-married neighbour Hobie (Will Ferrell) - something of an Alvy Singer figure - falls helplessly in love. Neither story is especially involving or well- developed, Allen biting off more than he can chew and quickly losing the thread(s) of the narrative(s) amid his unwieldy ensemble cast(s). Like many Allen fans, I'd concluded that he was simply making too many films, and not taking sufficiently long on each one. Instead of slowing down, Allen seems to have speeded up in the last twelve months: Melinda isn't even his latest, as Match Point scored surprisingly well at Cannes 2004. And Melinda isn't strictly even just a single work - it's really two shorts, sharing an upper-middle-class Manhattan setting and a central character named Melinda (both played by Australian actress Radha Mitchell). The split-narrative gimmick is set up by a framing-story in which a group of intellectuals discuss whether the essence of life is tragic or comic. Sy (Wallace Shawn) suggests that it's all a matter of subjective attitude, and that individuals can interpret similar events in either tragic or comic ways. As a case in point, he provides the starting-point for a story: the unexpected arrival of Melinda interrupts a dinner-party hosted by an actor and his wife. Ferrell is the most watchable and amusing element of the whole show - not surprising, as he's the Allen-surrogate and thus gets pretty much all the best lines. The comic stuff isn't too bad, but the tragic counterpoint falls flat at almost every stage - wasting the talents of Chloe Sevigny as Melinda's dissatisfied former college friend who offers her shelter after the latter's latest domestic disaster. In the comic strand, the actor is neurotic Hobie (Ferrell), his wife film-maker Susan (Amanda Peet) - their troubled relationship placed under further strain as Hobie gradually falls in love with his ditzy downstairs neighbour Melinda. In the tragic counterpoint, the party-hosting couple are gloomy Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) and the practical-minded Laurel (Chloe Sevigny). In this version Melinda, who went to college with Laurel, is much more 'damaged goods' - suicidal after some traumatic emotional events, including losing custody of her children. As 'tragic Melinda' finds solace with piano-playing smoothie Ellis (Ejiofor), Susan tries to match up 'comic Melinda' with an eminently-eligible rich dentist (Josh Brolin). Complications ensue. Though nobody's idea of a return to Annie Hall form, Melinda and Melinda is necer less than watchably amusing fare for its brisk 100 minutes - Allen has got an experienced, firm handle on this kind of sophisticated material, and certainly hasn't lost his comic touch. Crucially, in Ferrell he's found the most engaging author-surrogate since Bullets' John Cusack - and while this bulky, burly actor is pretty much the exact physical opposite of the writer-director, he's very much the star turn here, elevating proceedings whenever he's on screen. Wallace Shawn fares even worse as the architect of the framing-story, popping up every now and again to remind us of the essential artificiality of this cumbersome, broken-backed, smart-alec enterprise. The fatal flaw is that for much of the duration it isn't entirely clear which "point" is being made - you'll quite literally not know whether to laugh or cry. [rating : 4/10] Allen's reputation, of course, is such that actors are still queuing up to work with him (I've always thought that appearing in a significant role in a Woody Allen film is something akin to an OBE), and Melinda features strong supporting work from Ejiofor and Brolin (amusingly obnoxious), while returning Sevigny to territory she hasn't much visited since Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco territory. With his priority firmly on the script, Allen has seldom been much of a visual stylist - but the two narratives (plus framing-story) are presented in unfussy, straightforward fashion. Vilos Zsigmond gives each a slightly different look, which is helpful in keeping track of which story it is we're watching at any given time - not an easy task at certain moments. In the end, Melinda and Melinda doesn't quite have enough oomph to justify the tricksiness of its structure - but nevertheless provides ample evidence to suggest Match Point may well justify another 32-mile round trip in the saddle. [rating : 7/10] Neil Young 5th July, 2005 MELINDA AND MELINDA : [6/10]** : USA 2004 : Woody ALLEN : 100 mins seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 26th June 2005 - public show ** [7/10] + [4/10] = 11/20 = 5.5/10, which rounds up to [6/10]. Ha!
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