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Inasmuch as it disappears today, I'll chance posting it in full.DOUBLE TROUBLE
by DAVID DENBY
Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda.â€
The New Yorker, Issue of 2005-03-21
Imagine Neil Simon and Arthur Miller engaged in a mettlesome debate: Is life a comedy or a tragedy? Is our “deeper reality†a joke or a catastrophe? That’s the idea behind Woody Allen’s new movie, “Melinda and Melinda.†At a restaurant in the Village, four friends are having dinner. Two of them are playwrights, one specializing in comedy (Wallace Shawn), the other in serious drama (Larry Pine). The atmosphere, warmed by wine and fellowship, is expansive, grandiloquent. One of the diners sets forth a proposal, and we see it as told: Melinda (Radha Mitchell), a distraught young woman, slender, blond, and travelling light, shows up unexpectedly at the apartment of married New York friends who are in the middle of giving a dinner party. We then see this premise as it’s developed first by the tragic playwright and then by the comic one. In the tragic version, Melinda is an alcoholic, a pill-popper, and suicidal; she can’t stop talking about herself, disrupts everything, and puts a strain on her two hosts, who are increasingly at odds. Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) is a onetime college hot shot getting nowhere as an actor in New York; his wife, Laurel (Chloë Sevigny), is a “Park Avenue princess†who teaches music part time between bouts of shopping. In the comic version, the hosts are again a couple coming unglued—Hobie (Will Ferrell), another failed New York actor, and Susan (Amanda Peet), a young filmmaker hustling cash for an independent feature she wants to direct. The two stories—accompanied by Stravinsky and Bartók for the tragic tale, and by Ellington for the comic tale—continue to play in alternation, with occasional shifts back to the restaurant. By the end of the evening, the four diners agree that comedy and tragedy are not mutually exclusive—on the contrary, the most enjoyable moments in life may be shadowed by pain, the saddest by an aura of absurdity.
My first response to this ambitious movie was relief. Many of the “late†Woody Allen movies have been tough to sit through, not just because they undermined the good will built up by his earlier work but because Allen’s appealing method of working—quickly and spontaneously—seemed no longer right for him. “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,’’“Hollywood Ending,†and “Anything Else†were conceptually so thin and undeveloped that they seemed to have been discarded onto the screen before Allen had worked them out in his head. “Melinda and Melinda†is fuller, more intricate; it has monologues, party scenes, good moments for actors. And it’s emotionally more alive than anything Allen has done since “Sweet and Lowdown,†in 1999. I was absorbed in it, and I liked parts of it. And I wish to God it were better. The trouble with the idea set up in the restaurant is that Allen only half carries it out. An odd sort of indifference or blindness seems to have overcome him during production—odd because making the movie work better than it does wouldn’t have taken much extra effort.
It turns out that the stories are surprisingly hard to tell apart. Almost every time Allen moved from one narrative to the other, it took me a few moments, and a fairly violent mental exertion, to realize which story I was watching. Different actors surround Radha Mitchell in each story, but, until nearly the end of the movie, her appearance and behavior are pretty much the same in both. Melinda the tragic and Melinda the comic are both self-destructive young women with sad tales to tell. And the general atmospheres of the two stories, and even some of the characters, are very similar—one quickly forgets the conceit that two very different playwrights are supposed to be shaping the material.
In the comic version, Will Ferrell has the funny Woody Allen lines—complaints, jealous rants—and he delivers them, as certain Woody surrogates have in the past, by imitating Allen’s speech rhythms and intonations. The rest of the comic story, however, is not very comical. And the visual scheme, which could have helped differentiate the two stories, is virtually identical. Both are set in Woodyland, that familiar elegant fantasy version of Manhattan, furnished for the umpteenth time by Allen’s set designer Santo Loquasto, and filmed by Vilmos Zsigmond. We are regaled with flawless Upper East Side town houses and SoHo lofts; a color palette of sombre browns, tans, ochre, dark green, and black; an air of beauty and luxury, with no glare, no neon, no pop culture anywhere. The movie—all of it—looks like a harmoniously chic design supplement to a Sunday magazine. Decorators will love it.
Allen seems to fall into his Manhattan classicism almost by reflex. (How many times has he taken the A train?) In this case, his desire that everything look and sound lovely overcomes any sort of practical sense of how to make the material work dramatically. The extraordinary handsomeness not only makes the stories hard to tell apart; it outclasses the principal characters, who are almost all shallow, nattering, self-seeking people. They fall in and out of love, but their passions seem abrupt and rather arbitrary; they spend much of their time complaining about themselves or the others. In the absence of satirical intention or strong dramatic action, we are left with such cranky questions as: Why put two failed actors in the movie? What’s learned from the doubling? If Allen wanted us to compare the playwrights’ treatment of the two characters, why does he shoot Jonny Lee Miller’s Lee from a hostile, objective middle distance? As Lee falls, he doesn’t even rate a closeup. Except for a suave African-American opera composer (Chiwetel Ejiofor), whom the tragic Melinda loves, these people are blocked and useless, and even the composer, who switches women very quickly and sweet-talks everyone, seems trivial and something of a fake. Chekhov’s characters are drowning in futility, too, and some of them turn malicious, but the people in “Uncle Vanya†and “Three Sisters†are trapped by land, by a serious lack of cash, by history. They aren’t free. The urban screw-ups in “Melinda and Melinda†can do what they want, they have plenty of money, and they still choose to behave like jerks. Why are we watching them? After a while, the debate in the restaurant begins to seem a little fatuous—there’s not much comedy or tragedy in the movie. As a philosophical position, the notion that life is a tangled mix of the two is, perhaps, plausible. But it’s a hopeless bog for this filmmaker.
Allen’s most grievous lost opportunity is with Radha Mitchell (who played Johnny Depp’s wife in “Finding Neverlandâ€). Born in Australia, the beautiful Mitchell, who has an anxious brow and darting eyes, bears some resemblance to the intense young Jessica Lange. Mitchell is a performer who brings an almost lyrical flow to vulnerability. But Allen abuses her skills. In both roles, he drives her relentlessly into the fidgets. Overwrought and fussy in one scene after another, this talented actress destroys her performance out of an obvious desire to please her director. The tragic Melinda invariably makes herself a pain in the neck, and long before the end of the movie one begins to have such sour thoughts as “People who can’t pull themselves together don’t rise to the level of tragedy. Neurosis isn’t tragic; it’s energy wasted.†The happy Melinda is only slightly less draggy. I found myself impatient and even a little bored with both Melindas, and Allen may have been, too—the happy Melinda story wraps up suddenly and unconvincingly, and the tragic one lands in disaster in a way that can only be called cruel. The point of unhappy Melinda’s fate seems to be: Stay away from losers—they will just pull you down. That kind of nasty wisdom is a long way from debonair conversations about the nature of life and art in a pleasant Village restaurant.
Nothing could be more charming than freckled, knobby-kneed English boys, particularly those from the North Country, so young Alex Etel and Lewis McGibbon can’t be blamed for what goes wrong in “Millions.†In a surprisingly sunny suburb of Manchester, two motherless lads—one pious and generous (Etel), the other enterprising and manipulative (McGibbon)—find a Nike bag filled with cash after thieves throw it off a moving train. Will the boys invest the money, give it to the poor, spend it on video games? And when will the nasty blackguards who stole the swag in the first place show up to claim it? “Millions,†written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Danny Boyle, should have had the enchantment of “Empire of the Sun†or the recent Italian film “I’m Not Scared†or a dozen other child-centered movies, but Boyle, the director of such scabrous films as “Trainspotting†and “28 Days Later,†can’t stop showing off his virtuosity. He changes camera speeds, zips through sequences, sends things flying through the air. We’re supposed to be overwhelmed by magic, but what we see is fancy film technique and a lot of strained whimsy. To use special effects without coming off as glib, you may have to be a boy at heart yourself (i.e., Steven Spielberg). “Millions†is amiable enough, but Boyle should have sensed that the greatest magic lay in the faces and temperaments of his fervent young actors.
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Topic - Excellent piece on the latest Woody Allen - clarkjohnsen 12:32:48 03/20/05 (1)
- Ebert and Roeper reviewed it... - mkuller 12:48:50 03/20/05 (0)
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