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 Trouble in mind Woody Allen makes a movie-film with "Melinda and Melinda"
Reading the semi-contradictory and sometimes absurd stories about how
Woody Allen's movies get made, it's a wonder they aren't all like, say,
"Hollywood Ending"--lightly clever in concept, strenuously executed,
quizzically undernourished.
But, marvel of marvels, "Melinda and Melinda," the 69-year-old
filmmaker's latest, his thirty-fourth as director, has many moments to
match his best work, and is easily the best comedy Allen's made in a
decade; and perhaps best drama, too, since it's a self-conscious mix of
both. (It's his most consistently crafted picture since "Husbands and
Wives.")
In the opening scene, Vilmos Zsigmond's camera sneaks from the
streets of Manhattan's meatpacking district into the honeyed warmth of
bistro-style restaurant Pastis. Post-dinner, someone tells a story about
a woman he knows, her troubled life, a woman he knows named Melinda. We
don't hear the story, but get the reactions of the guests, a comedic
off-Broadway playwright, Sy (Wallace Shawn), who finds the terrible
story a source of comedy, and Max (Larry Pine), the dramatist, is a
countering voice, seeing the tragic in everything. A challenge is
struck, and the pair of playwrights, friend-warm and wine-woozy over the
protracted dinner, narrate parallel stories. The movie's structure is
quickly set up, but a more important cue from the first moments is the
supple nicety of Zsigmond's cuttable frames. There are close-ups and
reverse angles, and the light on the faces is beautiful and sculptured,
and we're still only at the setup. Zsigmond's not working the long-shot
reserve of too many of Allen's cinematographic collaborators, whose
static tableaux often seem more inert than even arcane European
experimental filmmakers like Straub-Huillet. From the purposefully
obtuse static placements of Carlo diPalma in "Crimes and Misdemeanors"
to the golden daze of lighting in "Hollywood Ending" by Wedigo von
Schultzendorff or Zhao Fe's inert "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,"
Allen's recent work has often seemed like a case of collaborators not
being allowed to collaborate, not given guidance or being willful enough
to enliven Allen's undernourished scripts.
Melinda Robicheaux is the billowing anecdote's test case, a frazzled
Radha Mitchell, who in the first version of the telling, lurches without
notice into a Soho apartment where there's a dinner party thrown by her
college friends, a clutch of painfully drawn, self-loving smug-monkey
airheads. "I'm running out of obsequious banter," Jonny Lee Miller,
particularly spiteful, gets to bleat, with Chloe Sevigny as his
sad-faced wife and Brooke Smith as their enabling best friend. Someone
behind the camera is willing to watch the thirtysomething female faces,
however, with the same regard as Sven Nykvist had for the women in
"Interiors": even when Melinda explains her recent matched set of dark
pasts, "It wasn't a half-hearted attempt, it wasn't a cry for help...
I'm still a little fragile, especially when things are closing in," you
are gratified to be able to watch Mitchell's habitation of this
woman. It's also right before the transition to the movie's parallel
gimmick that you realize there's a ready weasel for some of the
lovingly acted mouthfuls of declamation: these are the verbal
improvisations of two dueling playwrights, one who wants to laugh at
death, one of whom wants to weep over burnt entrees: "Chilean sea bass
in caramelized phyllo is not scrambled eggs!"
Once Allen begins to intercut the stories, Mitchell is the only
constant, and a marvelous one, able to convey the self-dramatizing gloom
of the tragic Melinda as well as the mercurial, indecisive, comic one.
"In my defense, I will say I was out of my mind on drugs": does that
come from the comic version or the dramatic? Intonation is everything,
as well as the moments where each Melinda is given to consider her
facile lies when she happens upon a mirror in a room. Another kind of
mirror: Will Ferrell plays an Allen-like fretter and fresser in the
comic version, and like several actors before him, brings a kit bag of
Woodyisms to the set. There's teddy-bear warmth and a layer of
distraction, too, rather than mere impersonation. Amanda Peet, a lanky
study in losing control, playing his indie-film-director wife, desperate
to finance her "Castration Sonata," has the most Allen-like line of
the movie: "Of course we communicate! Now can we not talk about it!"
"Melinda and Melinda" is busier, less mysterious than one movie I
can think of with a striking parallel structure about one troubled young
woman, Kieslowski's "Double Life of Veronique," but it has several
kinds of generosity that make for a smart entertainment that
consistently rewards the ear and eye. The light is luminous, and it
makes the actors' faces glow. There's just enough of street life, and
French-styled cafes and bistros like Pastis and Gitane and Il Buco to
suggest Manhattan's present-day theme park of the mind; Santo Loquasto's
set decoration neatly indicates the lives of the characters who will
live in those places; and both Zsigmond and Allen are mesmerized by the
faces on screen, letting us contemplate either the comic or dramatic
discomfort visited upon them by a room of writers. "Life has a
malicious way of dealing with great potential," one of the self-serious
tut-tuts: watch them squirm. "Melinda and Melinda" opens Wednesday.
Also by Ray Pride Tip of the Week
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Like life
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Kid power
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