Tenth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave
New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop
(and political) culture
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Topical note: For several
years now (starting with Whatever Works
[2009]), Woody Allen’s American film distributor has been Sony, much in the
news lately; specifically for him, Sony Pictures Classics.
Subsections below:
A divided story is heralded with a café debate Pluses and (more frequent) minuses
Is the larger theme a nonstarter, or the ultimate result a dud?
A flawed film as a harbinger of unexpected success
Melinda and Melinda is not something I’d recommend to most viewers
of Woody Allen films. If in his late
period (post-2000) he sometimes echoes early, great works of his—Anything Else (2003) flatulently
reproducing aspects of Annie Hall
(1977); You Will Meet a Tall Dark
Stranger (2010) roughly analogous to Hannah
and Her Sisters (1986)—then Melinda
seems to echo Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989) in its alternating serious and comedic treatments, and raising the
question (here, so self-consciously), Which artistic form captures life better?
If so, the “homage” to the
earlier film is almost an insult, because Melinda
and Melinda is crude enough and, as a whole, un-gripping enough that it
very much makes us ask why Allen even made it, while Crimes is one of his truly greats, even winning awards in 2010
approaching 20 years after its release. But there are aspects of Melinda that reward attention or make a
basis for further consideration, as I’ll show.
A divided story is heralded with a café debate
When the basic theme/structure
of Melinda (after initial titles
underscored by abruptly segueing from classical music to the familiar Duke
Ellington work “Take the ‘A’ Train”) is laid out by a rather academic
discussion at the familiar Allenesque setting of a Manhattan café table, you
figure Allen had better have an interesting unfolding story, or pair of
stories, ahead.
Alas, the first talker to
deliver a keynote remark, a comic playwright (apparently named Sy) played by
Wallace Shawn—a frequent participant in
Allen films all the way back to Manhattan
(1979) and in the recently-before The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)—here makes you feel that, in some general,
long-term way, Shawn is a sort of Bilbo Baggins (or Yoda) of Allen’s world.
He’s a lovable oddly-round-headed sort—his face looks like that of the Cabbage
Patch doll no one wanted—with that jaunty, kindly-humored academic’s way of
explicating an idea that reminds us of the patient high school debating teacher
he played in Clueless (1995).
In Melinda, Sy makes his well-turned case for comedy being the best
way to capture life (the argument he makes, at first, is subtle enough—as is a
bit of the argument of his debating opponent—that it seems both antagonists are
arguing, for a time, for each other’s preferred dramatic mode). “Tragedy confronts;
comedy escapes,” or close to this, Sy argues; the point is boiled-down enough
that it seems as if Allen is in third-rate high school teacher mode, not
someone who can really turn out exquisite drama. (As it turns out, Shawn/Sy’s
jovial delivery, only a couple minutes of film time [he turns up at film’s end,
too], is one of the most-instant-jolt-of-fun things in the entire film.)
His debating antagonist, Max, played
by Larry Pine, is a hangdog-looking sort
standing up for the primacy of tragedy. Brooke Smith is on hand as
another “county to hear from” at the table, as is another male. The two debating
playwrights then will capitalize on a sort of case-in-point—a story, presented
by the third male at the table (whose story is not unfolded from his mouth; the
scene dissolves away after he starts), of a woman who turns up at a dinner
party and seems in desperate need of a haven while…. Then, to prove their
points about comedy and tragedy, Max the tragedian will tell a story (adapting
the real-life anecdote) illustrating that her situation is best treated by tragedy;
Sy will do his part regarding comedy.
If this sounds rather tedious,
or high school–ish, the initial debate actually is unfolded pretty
economically.
Incidentally, within this film’s
structure, there is a bit of a philosophic problem that Allen doesn’t squarely
address. For instance, I wondered whether the “real-life” woman arriving at the
dinner party is meant to have actually had an experience approximating either
or both of the stories the two men tell. Anyway, what the film delivers, in quite
partitioned a fashion, is supposed to flesh out whether or not each artistic
approach is adequate.
But as it turns out, we have no
way of knowing whether either is, because we never hear the “objective” story. So,
we don’t even know for sure if either, both, or neither artistic approach is fairer to the simple facts. And we don’t know for sure whether the point is
that either approach captures the emotional
and “sense-of-life” nuances better. (All of which may be part of Allen’s
point.) In fact, the two stories diverge on broadly presented facts to a large
extent (which may argue to how artists always exercise license), while Allen
does tickle us with some droll “little” facts being vaguely common to both
stories, such as some passing issues about “single-malt Scotch” (more on this
sort of thing later).
After a while of watching the
film, what we do find is that the serious drama is more interesting, which of
course makes sense, given Allen’s increasing interest in his late years in
doing better at serious works. He even states in Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf, 2007), within pp. 56-58,
that with Melinda, his heart was in
the serious story, leaving him later with feeling the film should only have
embodied that.
The question with Melinda then is, is it worth our while
to see the two stories? Will we get something out of them, aside from pondering
(which many viewers really won’t) the drily academic question of whether comedy
or tragedy is the form of art more adequate to representing life?
Pluses and (more frequent) minuses
You do get some positives, as
seems to occur even with the most abysmal of Allen’s late films. With all the
money (even if a very few million) spent on an individual film of his,
something good manages to—if I might mix metaphors—squeeze up through the
floorboards of a turkey. (By the way, enabling Melinda, Allen had gotten a distribution deal with Fox Searchlight,
a rarity for him; he remarks in Lax, p. 56, that a studio head, however interested
the exec was in working with him, was put off by Allen’s exercising here his
typical method of not showing a full script prior to the project being
greenlighted. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, after an
initial release in the U.S. in March 2005 at one New York theater, which brought
in X amount of money, Melinda got a
very limited release in other theaters, and then brought in very little money
[per theater]. It apparently didn’t go to wide release in the U.S.
The photography is nice, quite
elegant—by Vilmos Zsigmond, who works with
Allen on other films, to very good effect. And some of the aspects here of
intelligent people milling in an upscale apartment, talking like current-day yuppies,
wine glass in hand, and/or negotiating with tough incidents in life (i.e., in
the serious story; e.g., mental breakdown, etc.), is refreshing when we know so
many U.S. films don’t do this (in an adult way) anymore.
But on first viewing, I found
the stories somewhat confusing, though keeping them apart isn’t too hard
(earlier on, the “needle-drop” underscore music gives cues as to when you’ve
gone from serious to comic, and vice versa).
You find there are two sets of
people: in the serious story, a couple, Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and Lee
(Jonny Lee Miller), an alcoholic actor having trouble getting a part.
(His career troubles are handled in suitably rather-dour terms.) Melinda
Robichaux (my phonetic spelling of a French-sounding surname) (Radha Mitchell, in one of the consistently good acting jobs here, in both roles), is in
rather dire straits when she turns up at the couple’s dinner party, but seems
generally composed. A man she, much later, ends up falling in love with is a
pianist she meets at a party, Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor, a rare example of
a Black actor in a fairly significant role in an Allen film; of course, he was starred
in the much-acclaimed film of 2013, 12
Years a Slave). (Allen’s way of depicting developing love, occasionally tossed
off so casually here [and in other films] that you forget he’s good at
depicting this bright side of life amid all his vinegar, here comes with Laurel
and Ellis playing different parts of a complex piano piece together. Something
similar happens in the comic story between Melinda and a man she meets on the
street.) Eventually, Laurel has an affair with Ellis, disturbing Melinda
acutely, which sets up an apparent final showdown of sorts.
##
In the comic story, the couple
Melinda “barges in on” is Susan (Amanda Peet), a young film director
(seeking to finance a new project), and Hobie (Will Ferrell), an actor
temporarily out of work. Here, an affair that disrupts things for the comic-story
trio (which echoes the serious story’s trio in only rough ways) happens between
Susan (Peet) and another man, leaving Hobie (Ferrell) free to pursue a
relationship with Melinda, though he is to be disappointed (temporarily) in
this aim.
While the serious story is
fairly interesting throughout (though it appears not to go terribly far, toward
its end), the comic story struck me, on first viewing, as interesting mainly
for Ferrell’s performance, where he plays a light-toned, slightly fey, antsy goofus-of-sorts
who utters one-liners very much like Allen (who of course doesn’t appear in the
film)—and doesn’t come across as corny for that; he is genuinely funny. But I
found myself more often won over in tiny moments by the individual one-liners,
while the larger comic story he was in rather left me cold (at least on first
viewing). (Steve Carell even turns up in a scene or two as Hobie’s
friend Walt.)
Is the larger theme a nonstarter, or the ultimate result a dud?
A bigger question raised here
is, How gripping and clear is this film’s patching together of these two stories?
Actually, the thing as a whole struck me as labored and pretentious on first
viewing, but that was partly because I didn’t get all that was going on within
the two stories. On second watching, I got definitely more of what was going on
in both stories, but I think a second watch is much more than most viewers,
even casual Allen fans, will want to do with this film. Suffice it to say that
Allen’s grafting a tragic and a comic story together works very much better
technically, to much better overall effect, in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Here, the method seems like just an excuse
to make another film as money and the availability of recognizable actors
allowed (at least on first viewing; further viewing may soften your assessment).
(I took a set of notes I had to
reorganize, which I sometimes do when a film’s plot is complicated, or details
first strike you as mixed in a kind of murk. One thing that helps you through this film is that, whenever you see a
cut to Sevigny, which happens not rarely, you are [still] in the drama [and she
is the kind of actress that just seems her own unique brand—not a sex kitten,
not an idiot, not an Earth mother, not a certain kind of femme fatale…; but someone who, for one thing, seems like a
quintessential denizen of Manhattan…].)
Another thing that typifies this
film: certain little details “cross over” between the serious and comic
stories—among them, a reference to “single-malt Scotch”; a motif of (the idea
of act of) rubbing a genie’s lamp to get a wish; and a certain low-lit “bistro”
in which two sets of people, one from each of the stories, have revelatory
conversations at certain key points. This makes you wonder whether it’s
important to note how these details occur in each story, but I think the more
likely truth is that they are just arbitrarily shared by the stories, and Allen
spread them out the way he did just to have fun for himself when concocting the
stories.
That is, if they’re supposed to
mean something thematically as shared by the stories, I think they’re really
red herrings. But I’m not 100 percent sure of that, and the fact that you don’t
know as you plod through the film a second time is one basis on which casual
viewers would be left cold by this film. (From another angle, you can say Melinda is one of those Allen films that
would make a better short story or novella than a film.)
Yet another interesting thing is
that, within the drama, there are
little comic bits, such as Melinda
referring to a private investigator—his apparent real name—as “Woodcrutch.” And
the comedy has little “tragic” bits such as, remarkable for a story that’s
meant to be a comedy, when Melinda first arrives at the dinner party, her
confessing—while stumbling along in a hall—to having taken an overdose of
sleeping pills (and they obviously haven’t taken full effect yet). That is, the
Melinda in both stories is a sad sort, or a woman at a sad pass in her life;
but the fateful turns that will make up her story in the comedy lead her to a
kind of happiness.
The comedy for Hobie (Ferrell)
winds up at an asinine/dramatic turning point when a date, played by a heavier-looking-than-years-earlier
Vinessa Shaw (who played the charming
streetwalker in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut
[1999]), ends up with her suddenly wanting to jump out an apartment-building
window, in a fit of despair. This is Allen somewhat mocking his more serious
moments.
Unfortunately, to add to the
difficulties of viewing this film, the disk I had had skips on it in scene 21
(skips that my cleaning it with a tissue couldn’t correct), so in the drama’s
last scene, I had no idea what happened after Melinda discovered Ellis with
Laurel at his apartment. The story had to end in some distinctive way, but I
don’t know how.
I have a lot more detailed notes
on Melinda, which shows what a “work
in progress” my trying to review it is. But handling it cursorily here seems
best for now.
A flawed film as a harbinger of unexpected success
Overall, I was struck by how Melinda seemed, historically for Allen,
a bridge between what came before (Anything
Else) and what came after (Match
Point [2005]). With Melinda, you
have a nicely shot, a-bit-wandering tale of modern-day New York yuppies, Allen-style
(as are included in Anything), and a
strong itching on his part to release a serious story (as in Match Point).
You feel Melinda was, all the more, a cramped case of “warming up” for Allen
when you realize that when he was freed, via help from production done in Great
Britain, to do Match Point, that film
“came off,” to use a frequent shop-talk phrase of his, considerably better than
this one. And Match Point made a hell
of a lot more money, freeing him (via studios’ being warmer to his newly proven
ability to make a lucrative drama) to plan to do more serious dramas in the future,
which he did, squeezing them out (in 2007 and 2013) between more crowd-pleasing
fare.
