One Woman, Two Lives

Movie Review:
Melinda and Melinda

PG-13 / 1 hr., 40 min. / 2005

For several years I have wondered what would happen if two different directors took the same script and each created his own film from it. I think it would be an interesting study in personal styles and interpretation of the material. On my budget, I’ll have to wait a while on that idea. But with Melinda and Melinda, Woody Allen has attempted something similar: Two different writers take the same story outline and put their own spins on it.

Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) and Larry Pine (The Royal Tenenbaums) play two playwrights dining with friends. A friendly argument regarding the nature of life – is it tragic or is it comic? – leads to a little challenge: The writers are presented with a basic story frame and are invited to defend their views on life by fleshing out the story in their individual ways.

The setup: A young woman arrives suddenly at someone’s door, manages to get invited inside, and tells her life story, which ultimately disrupts a marriage or two and leads into a romantic triangle of some sort.

Wallace Shawn as Sy takes the material and weaves a comedy: In a depressed moment, the up-tempo Melinda (Radha Mitchell) has taken a suicidal amount of sleeping pills, then changes her mind and staggers to a neighboring apartment to get help. The couple, Hobie and Susan (Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet), are in the middle of a dinner party designed to impress a film financier; but Melinda’s arrival upsets the affair. Soon, Hobie is infatuated with Melinda despite his best intentions of being a good and supportive husband to Susan.

Larry Pine as Max takes the material and creates a tragedy: Melinda is an old college friend of Lee and Laurel (Jonny Lee Miller and Chloe Sevigny), and after several months of obscurity she shows up while they are having a dinner party with friends. Melinda has been dumped hard by a previous husband and is ready to give up on love and life. Her plight and her “short” stay at Lee and Laurel’s home become a distraction to Lee, who is already cheating on Laurel anyway; and Laurel finds herself falling for a cocktail lounge pianist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who in turn falls for Melinda before falling for Laurel, thus leaving Melinda burned by a man for the second time.

I’m going to start by being totally candid: I have yet to see why everyone thinks Woody Allen is so funny. I rented this film because my wife was curious about the premise, not because I am a fan of Allen. I don’t even register as a blip on his Fan-o-Meter. But I will admit, equally candidly, that the premise as outlined on the DVD case did have me curious as well.

As an exercise in film production, Melinda and Melinda is a perfectly acceptable entry. The script works, in general; and Allen’s direction gracefully flows between the two disparate storylines, something that could have been hopelessly bungled and confusing in someone else’s hands.

Radha Mitchell (Finding Neverland) plays both Melindas, and either one as its own performance would not be any noteworthy achievement necessarily. What does make her performance worth watching is the way she plays both parts in one movie. As the tragic Melinda, she is a chain-smoking, jittery, nervous wreck who talks a mile a minute because silence would be too painful. As the comic Melinda, she’s spunky, sometimes cocky, and much more buoyant.

The supporting cast includes Chloe Sevigny (Boys Don’t Cry), Amanda Peet (Identity), Josh Brolin (Hollow Man), and Will Ferrell (Elf). If it weren’t for Mitchell’s tour de force as the two Melindas, Ferrell would steal the show completely as Hobie, the naive and energetic B-rate actor married to Peet’s high-maintenance indie director Susan. Ferrell is the high spot of the comic tale, proving once again that not all Saturday Night Live cast members flop miserably when weaned from their weekly moronic shtick.

Now, here’s my problem: Melinda and Melinda is simply not very enjoyable. Certainly either tale by itself would not fly far at all, but even intertwined as they are, they still don’t achieve a whole lot. The comedy tale of Melinda is really not all that funny. Ferrell provides some chuckles, and the climax to his evening at home with another woman is light, but the story as a whole falls flat. It doesn’t help that I don’t find much to laugh about where adultery is concerned. On the flip side, the tragedy is not all that gripping. I was not drawn in to Melinda’s story, and just didn’t care about her plight by the end.

I can think of a few reasons why this film didn’t work for me. First, the flipping back and forth between the two tales does not allow us to be completely absorbed by either one. Around about the time we just might be working up some tears for Sad Melinda, the story pauses and switches to the Funny Melinda, throwing us for a bit of a loop. By the time we’ve recovered and are ready to laugh, we are suddenly watching Sad Melinda again. I see what the film wanted to accomplish, but its method manages to weaken the emotional impact on both sides.

Second, and probably more significantly, the film avoids some potentially far more interesting methods of study. As it stands, the two writers are presented with little more than a set-up, from which they both quickly diverge. Alas, I was hoping for more sheer similarity. The opening scene (and the DVD cover) suggests that what we are going to see is the same set-up, the same set of characters, and the same storyline – but viewed alternately through a comic lens and a tragic lens. Once the initial dinner party is over, our two Melindas strike off on entirely different paths.

I was also hoping for more interplay, more ironic cross-references between the two stories. Yes, there are marked similarities: Both stories include a pivotal conversation in the same restaurant set, the introduction of an ethnic character who appreciates good piano music, and a woman attempting to commit suicide by jumping out a window. But in the end, both stories can stand on their own two feet. This may have been what Allen wanted, but they therefore lack the dynamic that would have existed if somehow neither story made total sense without the other. If the stories needed each other in some way, how much more intriguing.

There was another interesting potential as the film progressed. Over the course of a few scenes, it looked as though the comic tale were drifting toward tragedy, and the tragic tale drifting toward comedy, thus turning the tables on both of the writers’ assertions. But this idea did not come to fruition, and faded away shortly after I began entertaining the hope that the film was about to get interesting.

And to really drive home its mundane nature, even the wrap-up with the two writers does not achieve anything. I can only imagine how much more complete and rounded the film would have felt if, for instance, the author of the comic version had left the dinner feeling despondent in some way, and the tragic author had left feeling somewhat elated. I won’t spoil it – not that there’s anything worth spoiling – but the ending we get is rather bland.

I realize I’ve spent a few paragraphs focused on what the film could have been instead of what it is. That is because it isn’t much, when all is said and done. It is quite possible that I would have enjoyed the film more had I not read the promotional description, because I would not have come to it with preconceived notions. When the reality did not meet up with my expectations, I felt a little let down.

But I don’t think I would rank it as highly entertaining either way. It is competently created, which I would expect from someone as seasoned as Woody Allen. But it ultimately lacks any real spice, any captivating reason for existing. With all due respect to his millions of admirers, I will continue to wonder why people enjoy Woody Allen.

My Score: 6