Film Review
Melinda and Melinda was the fourth misfire in a row for Woody Allen
in the early 2000s and even his most loyal fans were left thinking by this
stage that his time was up. It is a film that has few redeeming features
and is one of Allen's least engaging works. Its main problem is that
it takes a pretty facile concept and fails to develop this into anything
meaningful or entertaining. In fact it is bland beyond belief.
Here, Woody Allen is on autopilot, half-heartedly churning out yet another
routine comedy-drama, recycling ideas from previous movies without even trying
to offer anything fresh and original. The film starts with a question:
is life comic or is it tragic? It's hardly a revelatory moment for
Allen - most of his films combine elements of tragedy and comedy - and the
idea that a group of intellectuals (in the film's opening scene) would make
a big deal over such a non-subject is fatuous in the extreme. But Allen
takes the subject seriously, seriously enough to squander several months
of his life making a 100 minute feature to help us decide whether life should
make us weep or laugh. The film ends up causing us to do neither. It
merely bores.
Crass and naive as the premise is, you can well imagine the younger Woody
Allen making something of it, interweaving two wildly contrasting stories
- one a full-blown tragedy in respectful homage to his hero Ingmar Bergman,
the other a wild Marx Brothers-like farce. Towards the end of the film,
Allen might have arranged things so that the distinction between the two
approaches is less apparent, and they might even switch over, so that the
tragedy becomes comedy, and vice versa.
Melinda and Melinda
offers nothing so delightfully blatant as this. In fact, it is so subtle
in its delineation of comedy and tragedy that you can hardly tell the one
from the other - and this is the film's most frustrating aspect. It's
not even bothering to address the point which sets it in motion. It
merely conflates two dull and unimaginative comedy-dramas and
expects the audience to identify which is the comedy and which is the tragedy
- a pretty pointless con as it is clear right from the outset that neither
epithet applies to either of the two intercut stories.
It's not just the concept that is skew-whiff, the entire film seems to be
lost at sea. The smattering of humour that Allen deigns to offers us
is so forced as to be more cringeworthy than funny, and, for the most part,
the performances are so bland and uninteresting as to leave you totally unmoved.
The only cast member who has any impact is Chiwetel Ejiofor - he appears
in just a few scenes (the best one being with Chloë Sevigny) but these
are the only ones likely to stick in your memory. The rest of the cast
appear to have given up on the meandering second-rate script and it is painful
to watch Will Ferrell's attempted impersonation of Woody Allen, killing stone
dead every last ounce of humour that Allen wrote for him with his Disney-style
delivery.
Lacking both a decent premise and the will to carry through even an ill-conceived
premise,
Melinda and Melinda flounders like a stranded whale and never
seems to get going. You spend an hour and half waiting for the film
to come to life but it never does. And when it ends, suddenly, you
are left feeling that you have spent all this time staring at a blank screen.
It's a film that Allen should have abandoned at the drawing board, and the
fact that he didn't do this but instead doggedly persevered to try to animate
the most still-born of projects leaves you wondering if he hasn't completely
lost touch with reality. Of course, this wasn't the end of Woody Allen,
and within next to no time his career would be on the up again, following
his timely and incredibly fruitful relocation to Europe, the place where
he is most adored.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Woody Allen film:
Café Society (2016)
Film Synopsis
Whilst dining out with friends in a Manhattan restaurant, two playwrights
get into an argument over whether life is most naturally tragic or comic.
One of the friends tells an anecdote and invites the playwrights to decide
whether it is tragic or comic. Two versions of the story begin to take
shape in the minds of the playwrights, both having the same starting point
- an unstable young woman named Melinda turning up unexpectedly at a dinner
party. In the tragic version of the story, the relationship of struggling
actor Lee and his breadwinner wife Laurel comes under strain when they have
to accommodate the depressive Melinda in the apartment they can barely afford.
Under Melinda's influence, Laurel falls for an attractive composer and is
then shocked to discover that Lee has been unfaithful to her. In the
comic telling of the same tale, Melinda's appearance has an equally disruptive
effect on the domestic life of aspiring film director Susan and her out-of-work
actor partner Hobie. Susan has all but given up on her marriage, but
Hobie doesn't yet realise this as he falls madly in love with Melinda.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.