The first Woody Allen film to be released here theatrically since Small Time Crooks in 2001 is a cineaste's entertainment, a sort of homage to the stagey and wordy romantic comedies of the 30s.
It's conceived as a meditation on the difference between tragedy and comedy - an apt inquiry for a director whose patchy output has comprised both genres, often in the same film. What it is not is particularly entertaining.
It is framed by a dinner-table conversation between four friends, two of them (Pine and Shawn) playwrights, who hold an earnest though rather wooden debate about whether life is essentially tragic or comic, each seeking to make his point by illustrating how he would turn a given story into a play. Over the next 90 minutes, Allen interleaves the comic and tragic readings of the story of Melinda (Mitchell), a woman who arrives unexpectedly at a dinner party.
These stories are narrated in parallel, and decoding the complicated array of similarities (a struggling actor; an Aladdin-style lamp; a piano duet) and differences (Melinda's back-story and hairstyles) would - and doubtless will - keep film-studies classes busy.
But there's not enough human texture in the stories that unfold to persuade us we should care about what happens. The characters are archetypes who people the director's imaginative debate rather than beings of flesh and blood.
There are moments of Allen's flashing wit: a liberal actor, about to bed a woman who is a Republican, worries that "I will get all worked up only to find we disagree on tax cuts" and a mild domestic dispute ends with the line: "Of course we communicate. Now can we not talk about it?"
But in the end, it is more accomplished than entertaining. It's engaging enough, but frustrating because it's hard to shake the feeling that Allen is making a film for his own pleasure rather than ours.
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Jonny Lee Miller, Radha Mitchell, Amanda Peet, Chloe Sevigny, Wallace Shawn, Larry Pine.
Director: Woody Allen
Running Time: 99 minutes
Rating: M, contains sexual references
Screening: Academy
Melinda and Melinda
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