Woody Allen, 2005

This year is somewhat of a milestone for Woody Allen. Not only does it see the release of his 40th film, more or less, as well as his 70th birthday, but it puts us within spitting distance of the 30th anniversary of what most people consider his all-time classic, Annie Hall. So it's unsurprising that many critics have looked at this film compared to that 1977 opus, variously praising it as a (near) return to form or deriding it for showcasing Allen as hopelessly stymied in a bygone age, focusing his films on characters who haven't existed for at least 30 years, if they ever did at all.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. Yes, this movie does continue in the vein of Anything Else, fitting in to Allen's return to neurotic romantic comedies set in present-day New York after various formalist experiments like Bullets Over Broadway, Everyone Says I Love You, and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. True as well that his characters, screenwriters, filmmakers, and actors who philosophize and wax poetic about Chekhov and Freud, are a dying breed, if not altogether vanished. Melinda and Melinda is at once more and less than this though.

It begins with playwrights having coffee in Manhattan, and debating the essence of life; more specifically, whether said essence is comic or tragic. Someone at the table tells an anecdote which the audience is not privy to, and invites the quarreling parties to decide if it is comic or tragic. This is all accomplished in about five minutes, and the movie is off and running.

It is a dual story, with one playwright giving the story a tragic edge, the other a comic one. The two are intercut, with occasional returns to our storytellers thrown in. Like many Allen films, this one follows creative Upper-West Siders as they have artistic and romantic breakdowns and hook-ups, with things more or less working out in the end. The casts for the two films differ almost completely, with only Radha Mitchell as the titular Melinda and some bit players featured in both. Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet star in the comedy, while Chloe Sevigny and Johnny Lee Miller (child hacker-turned hero Zero Cool from Hackers) star in the tragedy.

The unfortunate thing about Melinda and Melinda, however, is that its "tragic" segments are almost as hilarious as its comedy ones, although for different reasons. While the comedy soars thanks to Will Ferrell's extraterrestrial likeability and comic timing, the drama lags due to its extremely poor acting and almost total failure to generate sympathy for its protagonists.