Melinda and Melinda (2005)
Dir: Woody Allen
Starring: Radha Mitchell, Will Ferrell, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloe Sevigny
The trouble with Woody Allen films that don’t star the eccentric recluse himself, is that his leading men usually portray an imitation of Allen, which more often than not leads to caricature, (see Kenneth Brannagh’s sycophantic stuttering in Celebrity for evidence.) Not so in Melinda and Melinda though, a whimsical yet hugely enjoyable delight; instead of aping Allen’s gushing verbosity, Will Ferrell treads a delicate line between erudite quips and screwball laughs as a man that falls in love with a beautiful stranger that comes to stay. Ferrell never ‘out-Woodys’ Allen, but proves an apt foil for the writer/director’s deft one-liners and throwaway quips, all delivered with the idiosyncratic style that has brought him to the fore of contemporary big-screen comedy.
This Sliding Doors-esque rom-com begins with two Broadway directors debating whether life is essentially tragic or comic; cue a story spun about a group of friends whose lives are all affected by the arrival of Melinda, a beautiful yet deeply troubled ex-socialite who comes with more baggage than a BA terminal on opening day. Both directors narrate an interwoven tale of their take on how Melinda will affect the group, both with tragic or comic undertones.
Radha Mitchell excels herself in the dual role of both Melindas, stepping out from Diane Keaton’s silhouette as Woody’s leading lady in her portrayal of a downtrodden Park Avenue scene-queen, surviving on a diet of scotch, cigarettes and neuroses. Wonderful support comes from an ensemble cast of Hollywood’s underrated finest, including Chloe Sevigny, Josh Brolin and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a hilariously self-assured piano player.
As is so often in Allen’s writing, the schizophrenic cynicism of the New York socialite scene that he clearly both reviles and revels in is never clearer than in this Janus-ian farce. Melinda and Melinda mercilessly lampoons the clichés of washed-up actors, (played with heartfelt animosity that touches a little too close to home by Jonny Lee Miller), affluent dentists drunk on their own success and the casual infidelities strewn amongst the character’s relationships that epitomise the Manhattanscene. Yet when Allen shows us the cocktail and piano parties held in plush Upper East Side lofts, the candlelit bistros that accommodate illicit liaisons and the dusty strolls along New York’s epic landscape, the shots are tinged with his sense of belonging, or at least the wishful face pressed up against the window, the cynical voyeur of the rich and the beautiful.
Melinda and Melinda has been criticised for merely rehashing Allen’s old material, namely Crimes and Misdemeanours, and telling the tales of characters that we have seen a thousand times before, simply with a contemporary backdrop; yet these snipes miss the point of Allen’s films. Certainly, the characters are familiar to us, but they are ones that Allen has actually met, ones who he has loved, hated, cherished and rejected throughout his lifetime, and no one can portray them with more honesty, clarity and piercing accuracy than the master of satire himself.
David Harfield
