Melinda and Melinda

Woody Allen doesn't like rehearsals. Many are the actors who tell stories about how they are asked to show up on the set and simply do their lines, straight up, often without discussing neither the script nor their part with the Woodster in advance, or without having met their co-actors. Interaction with Woody is kept at a minimum. Allen admits as much himself in Woody on Allen, his interview book with Stig Björkman, and confesses to not really giving much directions to actors at all - he relies on his seasoned cameramen, his scriptwriting craftmanship, and the usually inspired cast choices (courtesy of Juliet Taylor).

And there was a time when all these things came together to form often good, sometimes great films. Back in the days of his last period of greatness - say, from 1986 up 'til 1995 or so - Allen often had recurring actors doing terrific turns with essentially recurring material in recurring settings, and while we'd seen it done before even back then, it worked cause of the actors' familiarity with the material and its writer-director-often star. Remember Crimes and Misdemeanors? Husbands and Wives? Woody was on a roll. So what happened? Where is Judy Davis, Alan Alda or Diane Wiest when you need them the most?

Well, certainly not here, in Melinda and Melinda, Woody's latest filmic rehash of well-situated people falling in and out of love in Manhattan. Framed in the same way as his great Broadway Danny Rose, where a bunch of elderly comedians sat around a delicatessen and talked about the miserable failure Rose, Melinda and Melinda starts out with a group of people sitting in a bistro, rather quasi-intellectually discussing comedy versus tragedy, and whether or not both moods can be applied to an anecdote one man in the group just told. Wallace Shawn, never having left his seat from My Dinner With Andre (1981), claims the anecdote is the stuff of comedy, while another man only sees the tragedy of the whole affair. Cue parallell storylines, offering two sides of the same coin: Melinda (played in both stories by Radha Mitchell), a troubled young woman, descends on her unsuspecting friends in New York, and open up cans of worms like people put on pants. The "fun" supporting cast include Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet, while Chloë Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller add some drama to the tragedy (except for Mitchell, there is no cast crossovers between the two stories). Structural similarities aside, the two stories don't have much in common; while one version of the story is a comedy and the other a tragedy, a lot of the comedy is not funny and the tragedy is never heartbreaking, so you're left with a big shrug. But if it weren't for the very pronounciated cuts between the two stories (ie always following a cut to the other story by showing the supporting cast, and not Melinda, as to avoid confusion), it might have become an interesting diffusion of two worlds, questioning things like identity, duality and origin. But this isn't Lynch or Altman or Bergman, and thus the two stories live their lives, cross cut but clinically separate. Too bad.

So who escapes unscathed from this flawed romcom/tragedy hybrid? Will Ferrell in the Woody part is at least given the best lines, and is quite apt at playing the straight man with a fair share of Allenisms, without succumbing to Branaghesque Woodster-channelling. Chiwetel Ejiofor, so good in Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, is solid as one of the very first African American cast member in an Allen movie not playing a servant or a hooker - it's not his fault that his character is a bit of an odd presence in the film: the Harlem-dwelling black man cultivated and neutralized for a white, upperscale Manhattan crowd. Chloë Sevigny barely makes it after a disastrous first half, but picks up at the end, and Radha Mitchell as Melinda x 2 is also passable, though her Aussie tone is a pinch unfitting for someone who supposedly grew up on Park Avenue.

But Woody doesn't escape unharmed. While it could be argued that he's run on empty for years, he's always managed to bounce back - not triumphantly, perhaps, but just so he could make it to the surface for a breather - with something amusing or at least semi-interesting. But when watching Melinda and Melinda, it strikes me how sloppy he's become. Yes, Vilmos Zsigmond's camerawork is fluid and flattering, but the editing seems to be slightly off-key all the time; a couple of frames here, a missed beat there. The pace, the rhythm of the dialogues - just not there. The acting is unfocused, rehearsal-like. If I hadn't seen it in a theatre, I might have guessed I was watching a workprint.

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