Sevigny is consistently laughable as she tries to pass herself off as a Manhattan socialite and piano virtuoso, using words she wouldn't have seen since the SATs, if she had ever actually taken them. She's a blank slate, totally failing to communicate emotion as she stares around herself, desperately hoping for a freak of some kind to take the heat off of her. Sevingy is no good as a romantic lead, working much better as a sympathetic infusion of normality in an insane world, the cute one among cat killers and albinos in Gummo, or the cute one among shallow killers in American Psycho. Even her role in 2003's Shattered Glass as a young political genius/magazine writer was a stretch, despite having the relatively easy job of playing opposite a robotic Hayden Christensen.

The comedy sections are brilliant, however, and Woody Allen has found in Will Ferrell a comedian who grasps how to speak his lines to get laughs. Virtually every Allen line is amusing, if you only know how to say it, which Ferrell does.

This is all aside from the visually hateful look of the film. If you're to believe the lighting, the entire movie takes place at about 5:20 PM in the summertime, which is to say every scene is overflowing with improbably golden lighting. This would be excusable if he was photographing something interesting. Instead, these effects serve merely to illuminated the interiors of multi million-dollar Manhattan lofts which none of his characters could afford. Allen's trademark New York exteriors are all but nonexistent in this film, with a sequence at a horse race being virtually the only EVA his characters embark on.

All told, Melinda and Melinda is not good viewing. The drama portions are so drearily turgid that they drag the comedy parts down with them, constantly killing any sense of urgency or consistency they'd managed to generate. One hopes that Allen has gotten whatever statement he was trying to communicate out of his system with this film. Like a friend who's constantly pontificating, I enjoy many, but not all, of Allen's artistic statements. I applaud him for taking chances, but I just didn't really enjoy this one. Hopefully, we'll be more in sync for Match Point, his next film (already in post-production), and his first shot entirely in England. If not, I'm willing to try again with his next one, whatever it may be or whenever it comes along.