The Woodman Cometh

Writer-director Woody Allen and Radha Mitchell on the set of Melinda and Melinda. Photo by Brian Hamill. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Year after year, Woody Allen churns out a movie, and in doing so, he turns us into Woody-experts, and – even more pleasurably – disappointed experts. Like sports fans charting a failing team’s transgressions, we measure a good Woody season against the bad, hoping for the best, but really, waiting to be let down (the Allen fan revels in pain, like the master himself). Every former disciple can name the moment where it all went wrong: the unnerving racism of Deconstructing Harry, or perhaps (you purist) those first self-conscious faux-Bergman shots in Interiors.

Investment in Allen isn’t unfounded; he has been a great artist, and his contribution to film is more significant than he would ever concede. But even when his offerings aren’t small masterpieces like Manhattan or Annie Hall, we continue to line up, besotted by a version of urban (pseudo?) intellectual life that Allen has perfected above all American filmmakers. A few years ago, essayist Meghan Daum, in a piece entitled “My Misspent Youth,” admitted that she designed her entire post-adolescent life around a desire to get to the Upper West Side of Manhattan: choice of college, choice of first job, forced affection for NPR. “I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow’s apartment in Hannah and Her Sisters,” she wrote. “These were places where the paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way.”

Allen shares her logic. If real estate is his first pursuit (oh, those exquisite, unattainable apartments where starving artists starve, oblivious to the millions beneath their feet…), authenticity is his second. With his persistent tributes to Fellini and Bergman, Allen desperately wants to be taken seriously, but as he enters his 70s, he seems to realize that he will probably be remembered first as a comic filmmaker. Melinda and Melinda is not exactly a clown’s sad resignation, but a truce between Allen’s two sides, and it’s one of his most comfortable films in years. After dully cycling through his favourite genres, making films distinguishable from one another only by their weird TV-star casts – the terrible cookie heist movie with Tracey Ullman; the stinky detective noir with Helen Hunt – he returns to basics: tragedy and comedy.

Four friends dine in a fabulous restaurant and have a fabulous argument over the most authentic form of art; it’s as if we’re overhearing Allen fighting with himself. Sy (Wallace Shawn) is a playwright who champions comedy because laughing is close to crying. Max (Larry Pine) is a “serious” playwright who sees tragedy as potency. Duking it out (albeit with red wine and bon mots rather than fists) each writer relates a separate story about a woman named Melinda (Radha Mitchell) who barges into a dinner party unannounced: one conceives it as tragedy, one as comedy, and the two scenarios unfold as two films.

The link is Melinda, and the legend to the movie map is her hair. Frizzy, curly-topped Melinda is tragic Melinda. She staggers into the apartment of an old college friend, trust fund princess Laurel (Chloe Sevigny), who is married to a struggling boozehound actor, Lee (Johnny Lee Miller). Melinda has returned to New York after losing her children in a nasty custody battle following a tragedy. Drinking and chain-smoking the way destructive, desirable women must in Allen films, her all-id presence is the catalyst that shoves Laurel and Lee’s shaky marriage over the precipice.

Meanwhile, tidy bob Melinda stumbles into the apartment of her married upstairs neighbours, Susan (Amanda Peet), a filmmaker trying to get funding for her movie, and Hobie (Will Ferrell), a kinder, less alcoholic struggling actor. Hobie, who falls for Melinda, is this film’s surrogate Woody and so, presumably, the subject of his wife’s film – The Castration Sonata. As Sy puts it: “He’s despondent. He’s desperate. He’s suicidal. All the comic elements are in place.”

Will Ferrell and Radha Mitchell in Melinda and Melinda. Photo by Brian Hamill. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Far greater actors have gone under trying to shoulder the weight of Allen’s tics, but Ferrell surprises. He doesn’t “do” Woody; instead he gives Hobie particularly WASP-y neuroses. As he goes crushy over Melinda, and the rift grows between him and his wife, his first instinct is shame and repression, played for laughs. Rubbery Ferrell only gets to pratfall a little, and he’s softer than most Allen men. Hobie, swimming in his big blazers and pining so sweetly, is actually likeable. For the first time in a long while, the Allen figure at the head of an Allen film doesn’t feel embarrassing, but sympathetic.

For those still reeling from Kenneth Branagh’s hysteria in Celebrity, or Jason Biggs’s mugging in last year’s Anything Else, it’s a relief to discover all the understated performances in Melinda and Melinda. As usual, Sevigny delivers her lines like an understudy in a high-school play, but her unmannered blankness is oddly affecting. Laurel is a young woman who seems to own nothing about her life, and Sevigny’s listlessness suits her. In smaller roles, Peet is buoyant without being silly and Chiwetel Ejiofor is sturdy and sexy as a dashing pianist with the sparkling name Ellis Moonsong (there are a record-setting two – two! – un-clichéd black men in this Woody Allen film, bringing his urban fantasy ever so slightly closer to the real world).

But the film is really Mitchell’s, an actress grossly underused since her startling debut in High Art. With romantic comedy hair, Melinda is ebullient, and as the tragic story gets more and more outlandish – drugs give way to straightjacket, straightjacket to murder – she stays the course and plays the part directly, without fuss. There will be giggles at the sheer extremity of her tale (tragedy is close to comedy, after all) but Mitchell refuses not to take it seriously. Good: a wink to us would pop the delicate bubble Allen has crafted.

The riffs in Melinda and Melinda are Allen’s favourite riffs, revisited yet again. Passion and magic win out over reason and logic (a rubbed lantern is a pivotal plot point). Muzzled artists flail in an uncaring society: Lee is forced to do deodorant commercials, though he was once renowned for “his Strindberg”; Ellis plays cocktail parties to fund his opera composition (while the rest of us watch Supernanny and eat Splenda by the bagful, it’s comforting to know such people exist, even if only in Woody Allen’s imagination).

In the past, it’s been hard to sympathize with Allen’s complaints about the silencing of the artist when he’s been lucky enough to get a film made, and seen, every year for almost 40 years. But this time around, Allen isn’t whining into the void; he’s relaxed, and the whining is usually funny, and a little poignant, too (though funny works better – sorry, Woody). Melinda is the Allen fan, drifting through his various incarnations, sometimes struggling with her servitude to these endless obsessions, sometimes happy just to be there.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.