'MELINDA AND MELINDA' Woody Allen film intertwines stories of comedy and tragedy

Both stories in the movie seem to be a metaphor for how life can be funny and tragic at the same time.
By JACK MATHEWS
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
It is faint praise to say that Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda" is the best movie he has made in five years.
Since "Sweet and Lowdown" in 1999, the Woody oeuvre has been expanded to include such weightless bagatelles as "Small Time Crooks," "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," "Hollywood Ending" and "Anything Else" -- perhaps the four worst comedies of his career.
But unlike those disposable larks, the flawed but ambitious "Melinda and Melinda" at least attempts some of the deeper themes that drove the likes of "Annie Hall," "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Husbands and Wives," and it has one of Allen's patently inventive setups.
At a dinner table somewhere in Manhattan, two playwrights are debating the merits of comedy and tragedy when a third companion begins a story -- a woman gets off a bus and interrupts a dinner party -- and asks them whether it is comic or tragic.
Naturally, the playwrights see the story developing through contrasting perspectives, and from that spare setup, one tells the woman's story as a tragedy and the other as a comedy.
Radha Mitchell plays the woman getting off a bus in both stories, and arrives at a Manhattan dinner party with the same complicated past.
A one-time Park Avenue ingenue, Melinda had married a handsome doctor and moved to the Midwest, where, after catching him cheating on her, she began her own affair, ended up in a mental hospital, and is returning to New York under court order not to contact her two children.
Sounds like a tragedy to me, and the film's chief flaw is that it's not always apparent which story is being told.
The jaunty soundtrack music over the comedy helps, as does the recurring appearance of Will Ferrell, doing an ill-advised impression of the director's stammering neurotic shtick.
The dual Melindas
The people at the dinner parties that Melinda interrupts are different. In the comedy, she drops in on an old college girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny), dying for a drink, a shower and some help getting her life back together.
In the tragedy, she drops in on strangers asking for help after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
In both stories, Melinda insinuates herself into the lives of her surprised hosts, who take pity on her and try to help her fall in love again. But her heart is torn between two Melindas.
Comic Melinda is hopeful and available; tragic Melinda is depressed and desperate.
Despite the different directions, the tones of the two stories seem deliberately similar, as if Allen wants to make the point -- as an expert witness, we'll concede -- that life is simultaneously tragic and comic.
There are humorous moments in the tragic sequences, and sad ones in the comic. There are bad romances and good ones. But the sameness of them saps each story of a distinct identity.
As with most of Allen's movies, his main characters take on the manners of either Allen himself or one of his past lovers/muses, Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow. Mitchell has opted for the Farrow approach, and she's very good at it.
As for Ferrell, I can only imagine the size of the thumbscrews Allen used to get him to imitate the director. Ferrell's a big guy who looks ridiculous playing the nebbish that Allen created for himself decades ago. It's like casting the Rock to play Charlie Chaplin.