*** (out of ****)
Starring Radha Mitchell, Will Ferrell, Chloe Sevigny, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Wallace Shawn, and Jonny Lee Miller
Directed & written by Woody Allen
2004
100 min 2004
Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda” begins and ends with a casual conversation over dinner. And that’s what this movie is: casual. There are some Woody Allen movies that are obviously intended to be of greater depth and importance: “Annie Hall,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Hannah and Her Sisters.” I refer to them as Woody’s “novels.” But he also has what I refer to as his “short stories,” like “Smalltime Crooks” and “Sleeper.” Both kinds of film have the same runtime, but you can always tell which is which.
I’ve always liked how even the Woody films of less consequence are made with no less competence. The average American comedy that aims for insouciance is usually a sloppy, rushed arrangement of monotonous framing, careless editing, short takes, and no eye for detail. Even the Weitz brothers, directors of “American Pie,” admitted that they used “shooting gallery direction” for that picture. But Woody never lets his films feel like they were rushed through production. His characterizations are always richer than the frame allows, his locations don’t look like someone moved in that morning, and he really directs.
“Melinda and Melinda” begins with a lovely crane shot and has, throughout, several long conversations that are performed in single takes. We (the camera) follow the characters around a room, instead of cutting from one face to another, which allows the words to build up more momentum. Woody always places his characters cleverly in the foreground, midground, and background. I’ve noticed it for years but I haven’t gotten around to studying exactly what he’s trying to accomplish, but the result is cinematic: the location of a character often reflects some information about the scene, above and beyond what is merely being said. A lesser comedy will often just throw figures out in a line.
The long takes make sense, not just because they build more dramatic force, but it makes us feel more like we’re watching a play (although the mobile camera keeps us from getting bored). This makes sense because the two characters we meet at the beginning of the film are playwrights (Wallace Shawn, known for good dinner conversation, and Neil Pepe) trying to decide—in a casual, wine-drinking sense—if life is ultimately tragic or comic. To illustrate their points, we see the same story of Melinda (Radha Mitchell) told as a comedy and as a tragedy. The two playwrights and their dinner-mates talk like normal human beings, but the stories of Melinda are, at many times, given the language of plays. Melinda and her fictional counterparts are abnormally eloquent and expository, just like in a play.
In both stories, Melinda is a wreck of a woman, who’s been roaming drunk and on pills since the disastrous end to her marriage. We meet her as she barges in on a New York dinner party. In the tragic story, she stumbles across an old friend and her unemployed actor husband (Chloe Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller). In the comedy, she stumbles in on a couple of strangers, again an unemployed actor (Will Ferrell), this time married to an ambitious and fatuous feminist filmmaker (Amanda Peet). Both marriages are on the rocks, both marriages try introducing Melinda to some stable men, and, in both stories, Melinda ends up part of a love triangle.
The point that Woody is trying to make with “Melinda and Melinda” isn’t whether or not life is comic or tragic, but is inherently neither. In true existentialist style, a situation is neither good nor bad until we impose our own values on it. So, indeed, the identical event can be tragic or comic. In fact, Woody structures the comic and tragic stories so that the same events take place—infidelities, sudden attractions, etc.—but simply by rearranging which characters do what our reaction is different. When Melinda is victim of adultery, the result is sordid and the adulterers seem like arrogant buffoons. But when Melinda herself steps out on a fella, it brings together “true love” and is seen as positive. And the scene in which Will Ferrell is overjoyed to find his wife in bed with another man is eerily hilarious.
Woody also seems to be emphasizing the use of the narrative ellipsis. All storytellers much pick and choose which episodes to leave out and keep in. Comedies achieve much of their comic effect by leaving certain incidents off screen, by alluding to them instead of showing them. Melinda’s mention of suicide in the comic story is either extremely brief or not even there. But tragedy drags everything out; in the tragic story, she relates her suicide attempt in one single take, almost directly to the camera. The narrative ellipsis is also a handy tool for marriage, although in that situation it’s known pejoratively as the “lie of omission,” but we won’t get into that right now.
Of course, I’m always worried about offering interpretations of Woody Allen’s work, ever since that scene in “Annie Hall” when he pulled the famous writer out of thin air to tell a pompous ass “You have no understanding of my work at all.”
Finished Saturday, December 31st, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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