It takes a shrewd filmmaker like Woody Allen to notice that the line between dramatic and comedic theater is a thin one. With a different actor and another filter, the same on-screen event can go from tragic to hysterical, or the other way around. \Melinda and Melinda,"" the latest offering from one of Hollywood's most gifted minds, is an exercise in erasing that line.
The film begins with an argument between two playwrights who we meet at the film's outset as they are talking about the nature of life. One argues that life is basically comic, the other, tragic. In an attempt to each prove their point, each one crafts his own story about a character named Melinda.
Melinda (Rhada Mitchell), in turn, becomes the center of both hypothetical universes. In the tragic story, Melinda, a broken woman who, fleeing a terrible divorce, drops in on her old friend and her struggling-actor husband, played by Chloe Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller respectively. In the comic story, she is the loveable neighbor down the hall to Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet, an actor and his director wife.
Mitchell has her work cut out for her playing both a tragic heroine and a romantic comedy love interest, and carries the load well. Being the only character on-screen throughout the entire movie must be daunting, but her performance is admirable. The challenge of the other actor's roles is they must try to provide flesh and blood to a character in half the time it would usually take in a film, and they do so with remarkable ease. Ferrell, especially, is a welcome surprise. Filling the role that Allen himself would have taken in his younger past, he is engrossing in his deepest comedic role to date.
The film goes further than simply putting the ideas of comedy and tragedy on display. One of the most remarkable things about ""Melinda and Melinda"" is the approaches that each story takes to what is, essentially, the same concepts. Melinda in one way or another becomes the vehicle for actions, such as adultery and an attempted suicide, matching each other on both sides of the film. But even the darkest ideas in the movie are given a humorous side in the comic half of the movie. This is the true beauty of Allen's film.
""Melinda and Melinda"" is the kind of film that every screenwriter wishes he could write but only the best could possibly do justice to. Though each side of the movie is supposed to be exclusively of one nature, it should not surprise the audience when they start sympathizing with Farrell during comedic parts or chuckling during a part of the drama.
This film, though initially about comedy and tragedy as two ends of a spectrum, seems to cross over into the other genre from time to time. Life, as Allen claims, is neither tragic nor comic, but interweaves elements of both. This may leave the audience feeling less than moved, but it was never Allen's intent to be emotionally profound. He is taking a long, hard look at his medium and commenting on it, just as his playwrights comment on their plays' depictions of life.
New York City never looks more brilliant than when it is in an Allen film. His shots of the city, even of the more mundane parts, look like works of art. If Allen's acting days are numbered, possibly signaled by Ferrell's presence in an Allen-type role, it's good to know that we will still have Allen's fantastic directing to look forward to in years to come.
There are few who can write and direct like Allen can. ""Melinda and Melinda"" is an exercise for Allen's audience on the inner workings of films and life from a writer/director who has known both so well.
