"He's despondent. He's desperate. He's suicidal. All the comic elements are in place." So says a playwright in the film "Melinda and Melinda," which was written and directed by Woody Allen. And for me, all the comic elements were in place when I watched this movie on DVD—I got a lot of laughs out of it.
I got a big kick out of the film's dialogue, much of which is delivered with a tongue-in-cheek seriousness—for example, where the central character says, "I remember just lying in my cell at night and thinking, 'My God. You are Melinda Nash from Park Avenue. What the hell are you doing in a woman's prison in Illinois?'"
Actually, there are two versions of Melinda in the movie—a "comic" version and a "tragic" version—hence the film's title. Both versions are played by Radha Mitchell, an actress not all that well known, although she appeared in "High Art" and "Finding Neverland." When watching "Melinda and Melinda," it helped me distinguish between the two versions of the central character to realize that Comic Melinda wears her hair in a neat bob, while Tragic Melinda's hair has a tousled look.
In terms of acting, "Melinda and Melinda" is an ensemble movie, and Woody Allen remains behind the camera. The cast is strong and includes Amanda Peet, Chloë Sevigny, Jonny Lee Miller and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The best-known actor in the film is Will Ferrell, who plays a sort of Woody Allen surrogate and gets some of the funniest lines—for example, he describes a dentist who hunts big game in Africa as "the Ernest Hemingway of the root canal set."
The idea for "Melinda and Melinda" is that the same raw material for a story can be shaped into either comedy or tragedy. The film uses the example of a distraught woman named Melinda barging into a dinner party and triggering changes in the hosts' lives. The movie interleaves two stories—one comic, the other tragic—created by a pair of playwrights from that situation. But there's pathos in the comic story and humor in the tragic story, reminding us that comedy and tragedy are actually not so far apart. However, the comic story has a happy ending, while the tragic story ends unhappily.
I would say that "Melinda and Melinda" is about storytelling. It seems to me to be set in a fantasy Manhattan populated by characters who are deliberately made to seem fictional. The acting style is, I believe, intended to convey that what we are watching is artifice. The film is more about wit than emotional payoff, and I definitely don't think it's a movie for everyone.
However, I think it's funny that the film has a character who's a Park Avenue dentist named Bud Silverglide. I laughed at the idea that Amanda Peet's character would be making a movie featuring a mostly female cast titled "The Castration Sonata." And I thought it was hilarious when Will Ferrell's character is told he won't get the role of the psychiatrist in that film, and instead he's offered the part of Moe Flanders, the retarded elevator operator with a cleft palate. If you enjoy jokes like these, then you'll probably like "Melinda and Melinda."
The "Melinda and Melinda" DVD is a two-sided disc that has the feature film in widescreen on one side and in full-screen on the other. Alas, there are no bonus materials. Below I've listed all the details for the "Melinda and Melinda" DVD.
DVD Details:
Release Date: October 25, 2005
Side A: Anamorphic Widescreen (1.85:1)
Side B: Full-Screen (1.33:1)
Color
Feature Film Run Time: 1 Hour 39 Minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Adult Situations Involving Sexuality, and Some Substance Material
English Mono
Spanish Mono
French Mono
English Captions for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Spanish Subtitles
