Melinda and Melinda” belies the idea that Will Ferrell is essentially Will Ferrell in every movie. Here he’s clearly playing Woody Allen, and he’s great at it. Ferrell plays Hobie, a neurotic actor in a dead-end marriage with a mad crush on his neighbor, Melinda (Radha Mitchell). Seeing Allen’s insecurities manifested in the strapping Ferrell is a gas, especially in a sequence where Hobie confronts the natural enemy of any Allen or Allen-like character: A handsome WASP with a house in the Hamptons. The WASP (Josh Brolin) is a dentist who Hobie’s wife (Amanda Peet) has set up with Melinda. When the wife mentions how good-looking the dentist is, Hobie responds with a quintessential Allen putdown, which is one part insult, three parts self-deprecation: “If you like perfect features...” Unfortunately, Ferrell isn’t the only one doing Allen in “Melinda and Melinda,” Allen’s entertaining but uneven new film. Nearly everybody is. Most of the characters live in fabulous New York apartments (lit warmly and photographed with care by legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond) and talk like 70-year-old men. Even the 30-year-old women. When a character played by Chloe Sevigny is invited to a small downtown restaurant, she replies that she hasn’t been to a dark bistro in years, as if going to one now would be the ultimate in naughtiness. As she speaks, you can see Allen, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Sevigny seems ill at ease with Allen’s dialogue, like a downtown hipster suddenly plopped into sensible shoes and an Upper West Side duplex. She is joined in discomfiture by Jonny Lee Miller (“Trainspotting”) as her no-good actor husband. The trouble might be the sheer amount of dialogue. “Melinda” offers a lot of talk and not much action. Most Allen films will include a tennis match, at least, but the most anyone does here is play the piano. At first the staginess seems to reflect the movie’s premise: It’s telling two stories, one a drama, the other a romantic comedy, invented during a dinner conversation between two playwrights (Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine). The movie alternates their approaches to the tale of a down-on-her-luck woman named Melinda. But the awkwardness, thankfully, only comes in spurts. Most of the film’s cast, from Ferrell and Peet in the comedy to Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Dirty Pretty Things”) in the drama, can handle everything Allen gives them. Mitchell, the center of both stories, brings great conviction to each. She looks haggard as the dramatic, or rather, tragic Melinda (remember this is Allen, who made “Interiors”). This Melinda shows up unannounced at the home of her college friend and her husband (Sevigny and Miller). Her story of woe includes an affair, children taken by the court and a long Greyhound bus ride. Dead-eyed with unhappiness, she drains feeling from every utterance, even when she calls her children “the light of my life.” This Melinda was probably never called “Mindy.” In the comedy, Mitchell’s hair is different, but also her mien. She’s altogether lighter, even when her character, a new neighbor of Hobie and his wife, interrupts their dinner party and reveals she’s just taken a bunch of pills. Vomit jokes ensue, and this would-be tragedy becomes a Preston Sturges movie. Ferrell shines in this sequence, as Hobie gets flummoxed by the visitor and because he has burned dinner. As the comedy Melinda tells her story, Allen highlights the liberties taken by comedy writers. This Melinda never had kids, thereby avoiding an inherently unfunny aspect of the other Melinda’s story. Recovering rather quickly — too quickly — from her pill trauma, the comedy Melinda is game for being set up with men. Allen’s main idea, expressed via his playwright characters, seems to be that tragedy and comedy coexist at all times. Indeed, Brooke Smith provides consistent, down-to-earth comic relief in the drama as another college friend of Melinda’s, though she is, and looks, substantially older than Mitchell and Sevigny. These friends set the drama’s Melinda up as well, acting from the human instinct to palm troubles off onto somebody else.
Allen’s contention that comedy bleeds into drama and vice versa can’t really be disputed. By the end of the film, however, the difference between drama and comedy is stark. The first has become unrelentingly dark and the second unbelievably fluffy. These developments might be intended to reflect the natural limitations of any one genre. More likely, they reflect Allen’s limitations as a storyteller.
