PLOT: Two writers debating tragedy and comedy create parallel but contrasting stories about what happens to a woman named Melinda when she blows into Manhattan.
As he demonstrated with his Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, 74-year-old Clint Eastwood is aging like a fine wine. As he shows so awkwardly in Melinda And Melinda, 69-year-old Woody Allen is just aging and whining.
The contrast is striking. Eastwood is still making simple, unadorned films but the ideas in play in them are fresh and mature and complex. Allen's films are similarly old-fashioned in structure, but so are his obsessions, his jokes, his musical tastes and his ideas about relationships.
So Melinda And Melinda is just another rehash. While it is neither offensive nor disturbing, it is tedious -- a real mood killer when the goal seems to be to stimulate audience discussion on whether life is a comedy or a tragedy.
The piece kicks off when two writers (Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn doing a pseudo version of My Dinner With Andre) sit down in a New York bistro to debate the primal nature of storytelling. Specifically, they discuss whether the same event, or the same central character's experiences, should be told through the refracting prism of humour or with harsh realism that makes the situation read tragic.
In the end, the meandering movie determines that life indeed is a tragi-comic state, that there is little to distinguish a comic approach from a tragic one because they overlap. Hmmm, seems to me that any grade-schooler with a class in Shakespeare could have figured that out without bothering to make a movie -- or forcing us to sit through this one.
As the two writers spin their webs, they seize upon two versions of what happens to a fictional woman named Melinda (each of them played by Radha Mitchell, the "other" woman in Finding Neverland). The parallel stories unfold in front of our eyes and Allen, sometimes awkwardly, cuts back and forth between them so often that the lines begin to blur and our interest begins to wane.
Together, the two stories within the movie are populated with an intriguing cast, because Allen has not lost his ability to attract name actors. Among them are Amanda Peet, Chloe Sevigny, Jonny Lee Miller, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Josh Brolin.
But the oddest choice is Will Ferrell, playing a fumbling dolt who falls hopelessly in love with one of the Melindas after his wife grows uninterested in him and their sex life.
As is the case in most of Allen's works in which he does not appear as an actor, there is a character that most represents Allen's paranoiac, obsessive-compulsive, whiner persona. Ferrell is his most bizarre alter ego ever and the big Christmas Elf embarrassingly does not seem to know what to do with the Allenesque dialogue stuffed into his mouth.
This is a lousy movie. Allen was nominated for an Oscar six times as a director (winning once), 13 times for writing (winning twice) and once as best actor (he lost). Two of his films were up for best picture, with Annie Hall triumphant. That was in the past. While Allen was once a great American filmmaker, the present is dismal and the future is murky.
(This film is rated PG)
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