Ellis and tragic Melinda visit the race track, relax in Ellis’s apartment, see a Broadway musical with Laurel and Lee, and kiss on a beach, a quick montage of romance, and admittedly a montage that seems more cinematic gesture than expression of significant love. Then, Melinda confesses to Ellis that she intentionally killed her lover—and that seems the height of Allen’s invocation of tragedy, the crazed vengeful woman, woman as destroyer, for which Melinda spent time in an Illinois women’s prison. “What do you want?” asks Ellis; and Ejiofor makes this sound like a genuine question—shocked, honest, concerned. “I want to want to live,” says Melinda, adding that with Ellis in her life she’s coming closer to that. Ellis seems inclined to think the killing was temporary insanity, though Melinda insists on premeditation: however, she doesn’t quite convey the drive of a furious woman. The violence is in the past, something remembered, not enacted for our eyes: and Aristotle, who identified plot, action, thought, diction, spectacle, and lyric poetry as components of tragedy, emphasized the enactment of large, complete movements evoking pity and fear in his definition of tragedy. However, Aristotle in his Poetics also noted that there are different kinds of tragedy, including those focused on character and suffering.

Lee, coming out of the bar Joe Allen, tells Laurel over his cell phone that he’s been fired because of his drinking—Laurel says she’s angry and disgusted and she knew this would happen. Jonny Lee Miller looks doomed—one can imagine him as an old drunk, confused about his own mistakes. When she goes home, Laurel finds Melinda and Ellis on their way to a Bartok recording session of an acquaintance of Ellis (we see Asian musicians) and she joins the couple for that, which she enjoys. Melinda says she finds the more turbulent parts of the music scary, another suggestion of her instability. Ellis takes them both to a bistro, where, he tells them, he has fallen in love many times. (If it’s special, then with it why aren’t we as careful, as making sure we dress in style, posing pictures with a smile, keeping danger from a child? sang Stevie.) Melinda and Laurel reminisce about their youth. Laurel says that Melinda had a reputation for being postmodern in bed (unexplained, that sounds strange and terrific). Melinda says that after her mother committed suicide she learned that you could only depend on what could be touched, on physical things. Ellis says that both Melinda and Laurel are passionate women (by comparing them, he is also suggesting the possibility of exchanging them); and when Melinda leaves to take a lawyer’s call about her children, whom she’s forbidden from seeing, Ellis and Laurel talk to the point of flirtation. Melinda has been failed by family and love. Will friendship fail her too? And is she too weak to be a genuine tragic heroine?

Ellis tells Laurel that when they met he saw her soul as clouded, protective, longing. Melinda returns saying that she almost wished the opportunity to change her legal status regarding her kids hadn’t come up (she’s not sure she can handle the stress, the possible disappointment). After the dinner that Ellis Moonsong has with the two women, one he is involved with, Melinda, and one he may become involved with, Laurel, Laurel goes home to Lee, who apologizes for his drinking, a liquor bottle next to him. Laurel does not admit where she was, which suggests her guilt. (Laurel has asked Ellis to visit her class—and he agreed, saying that he’s a good lecturer and hopes that he’s not a better lecturer than he is a composer, a possibility and fear that connects him to Laurel and Lee.) Cassie, after Laurel tells her about the evening with Ellis and Melinda, thinks Laurel will act on her flirtation with Ellis. No recognition is given regarding Cassie’s being implicated in that possibility, as Cassie had Ellis perform at her party and encouraged Laurel to perform music there too, thereby demonstrating what Ellis and Laurel had in common. Cassie is participant and witness, part of the chorus.

Hobie tells a friend, while playing basketball, about his disappointment with marriage and infatuation with comic Melinda. (It’s surprising that Allen’s men play basketball, a team sport, rather than tennis, which I now think of as a sport for individualists. Hobie’s friend advises him to tell Melinda how he feels.) Hobie, to get something for Melinda, goes to a gift shop, and while there he rubs an old lamp—with a wish that he get out of his marriage without hurting his wife; and when he goes home he finds his wife in bed with one of her producers, the real estate mogul, and she tells Hobie she wants a divorce. The mogul will pay the legal expenses. (I can’t believe that I found a desire for true love floating around, inside my soul because my soul is cold, one half of me deserves to be this way till I’m old, but the other half needs affection and joy, and the warmth that is created by a girl and a boy, I need love, I need love, rapped James Todd Smith, also known as LL Cool J.) Hobie, his wish granted, immediately makes a date with Melinda (in conversation with Melinda, Hobie mentions Chekhov and that he played Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and Shakepeare’s King Lear, both with limps—Hobie is one of those actors with one idea, an interpretive trick). Melinda describes walking by a piano being moved on the street and meeting a man she thinks she’s in love with, Billy Wheeler, played by Daniel Sunjata. Daniel Sunjata, who was born in Illinois and received his BFA from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and his MFA from New York University, starred on Broadway in Richard Greenberg’s play “Take Me Out,” for which he was nominated in 2003 for a Tony award as best actor (the same year he was chosen as one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People). Sunjata also appeared on television in “Law and Order” and “Sex and the City.” To describe the effect of meeting Sunjata’s Billy Wheeler, Radha Mitchell’s Melinda quotes a Cole Porter love song to Hobie about bells that now and then ring; and Hobie doesn’t quite know what she’s talking about in his distress.

Wallace Shawn’s comic playwright Sy thinks Hobie’s pain is ample territory for comic exploration. The laughable is part of shame rather than pain, according to Aristotle: but Hobie’s feelings are only known to his male friend and the film’s audience so there’s little embarrassment or shame. Even ancient Greece knew different stages of comedy, more evidence that aesthetics change with time: old Greek comedy was often political, scatological, and episodic, featuring a chorus and including parody of famous men; middle comedy had no chorus and was mythological, more abstract, and less personal and profane; and new comedy was social, about family and private life, and given to caricatures, including the mockery of professionals such as cooks and soldiers. Our own contemporary comedy seems more accepting of pain. What is funny about Hobie’s situation is that he thought he was going to win an easy victory only to find a new obstruction in Billy Wheeler: life’s being uncontrollable is what is confirmed to our amusement.

A sexy Barry White song tracks Hobie as he tries to overhear what Melinda and her new boyfriend are doing in her apartment, and a bit of slapstick follows, involving accident, embarrassment, and social disapproval. (Maybe Aristotle and Sy are both right.)

Tragic Melinda talks to Cassie about Laurel and Ellis—Melinda heard Laurel and Lee argue about Lee’s infidelity, in the midst of which Lee accused Laurel of being interested in Ellis. That—what Aristotle might call the beginning of recognition and reversal—has disturbed Melinda. When Melinda finds out from Cassie’s lawyer husband that Melinda will not get to see her children, she’s hurt again (she nearly does a junkie dance while leaving his office). Melinda goes to Ellis’s apartment; and Laurel is there. “Living is messy,” says Ellis. Melinda wants to rest; and her desire for momentary rest becomes an impulse toward eternal rest. “I want to close my eyes and never open them again,” says Melinda, before saying, “I’m going out the window,” which Ellis prevents her from doing. Melinda looks wild-eyed; and she has lost some of her beauty in terror. Laurel calls Cassie to ask if Melinda can stay with Cassie: “She’s one of those people who will always need help.”

Comic Melinda and her Billy Wheeler (Sunjata) double-date with Hobie and the woman they’ve paired him with, an acquaintance of Billy, a Republican woman who was featured in Playboy (she says she’s radical in the bedroom). They attend a horror film screening and a dance party with masked guests; and the Republican woman agrees to go home with Hobie—and, in gratitude, Hobie says he’ll never vote against prayer in the schools again. The woman is still disturbed by her own breakup, and says life is meaningless, and threatens to jump out of his window. Melinda, unaware of how Hobie’s date ended, is jealous of Hobie’s new romance and realizes how much she likes Hobie—and she tells him.

The film returns to the restaurant where it began, with the four intellectual friends talking about comedy and tragedy and they mention a friend’s sudden death and his upcoming funeral: it is death that shadows life—whether life is seen as comic or tragic; and death is like a casting director that suddenly takes an actor off the stage while the play continues, leaving the other actors and the observers to continue the plot while recalling and making sense of the absent figure. Following the first of three screenings I attended of Melinda and Melinda, a late Sunday night screening during the film’s opening weekend, people exclaimed, “Wasn’t that good?” and “That was good” and “I enjoyed that.” Having read lukewarm and even chilly reviews of the film, I was surprised and pleased: and though I do not know him, I was glad for Woody Allen, who is a storyteller and a thinker who makes films.

“I just want to make a lot of films and keep putting them out. And I don’t want it to be: ‘Oh, it’s the new Woody Allen film! Two years we’ve waited for it!’ I just want to turn them out—and that’s it,” Allen told his interviewer Stig Bjorkman, quoted in Woody Allen on Woody Allen (77). Woody Allen has done just that, and his new films compete with his old films in the consciousness of many critics. Many critics reject some of Allen’s ambitions to produce serious art (such as Interiors and Another Woman) but insist on their own expectations for entertainment. There are other critics who are more open to what the artist attempts. Allen has said, “I just feel that you must—if you’re operating at the maximum of your capabilities—aim at very, very high material. And that to me would be the spiritual, existential realm” (211).

The Chicago Tribune’s film critic Michael Wilmington began his March 22, 2005 review with a salute to Woody Allen: “Woody Allen’s films may have fallen on hard times critically in recent years, but he remains one of the great movie comedy creators. He can still crack a fine joke, spin a witty tale. In Melinda and Melinda, Allen gives us at least half a classic comedy—more than we usually get at the movies these days—while having some elegant fun with an idea that has intrigued poets and smart alecks through the ages: the interchangeability of comedy and tragedy.” Wilmington went on to describe the film, emphasizing the fictive nature of Melinda and both of her stories and allowing that he perceived some confusion between the two narratives, before stating that the film is about “how we weave tales and mold the world to our fancy. Neither story is real; nor are any of the characters, and as the two stories connect, collide and twist around and through each other—united by little except Melinda and Manhattan—Allen keeps vamping at his theme that laughter or tears count as much as events.” Wilmington reminds his readers that the best Allen films—he names Annie Hall, Manhattan, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Bullets Over Broadway—mix both comedy and tragedy. (Allen himself has said that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, and Bullets Over Broadway came closest to his original conception of them.)

“Melinda and Melinda is a movie about the symbiosis of the filmmaker and the audience, who are required to conspire in the creation of an imaginary world. He shows us how he does it and how we do it. In its complexity and wit, this is one of his best recent films,” concurred Roger Ebert in his March 23, 2005 Chicago Sun-Times review. Ebert, whose fame has seemed to outrun his actual value, can be insightful, and I think he is in regard to Melinda and Melinda. It is a film, Ebert argues, that reveals that “movies are only movies,” compelling the realization that “that neither Melinda nor Melinda is real, but Woody Allen certainly is.”

“I make any film I want. I don’t care if the public likes it, the critics like it. I mean, I would like them to. But if they don’t they don’t. I make films for my own enjoyment,” said Woody Allen, though he also acknowledged that film studios must be concerned with profit and that could affect him one day (in Stig Bjorkman’s Woody Allen on Woody Allen; 81).

Melinda and Melinda is a small, elegant gem. It is, besides being a consideration of the merits of comedy and drama, a light meditation on relationships, on artistic opportunity, and on romantic disposition (belief in wishes and possibility); and it can seem both logical and whimsical, while also being a series of images featuring well-dressed figures in nicely appointed rooms (often their clothes look beautiful—well matched—within the color schemes of those rooms). The film achieves elegance in its balance of various elements, some of which are not in themselves distinguished: the whole is greater than its individual parts. One reservation I have is that there is not a lot of movement in the film, so there are moments when one is conscious of watching a film that seems more still life than moving picture. This style allows for observation, contemplation, and relaxation. Another reservation may regard the few moments spent discerning which narrative is which, though this did not cause me nor, from what I could tell, most people in the audience much trouble. The need to make distinctions between the two stories does compel comparisons and quickens understanding. The cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond has said Allen was against an obvious visual contrast in the two stories; and production designer Santo Loquasto said that Allen likes his images to have a certain golden, even autumnal glow.

“You may wonder, though, why he didn’t vary his filmmaking style more between his Melindas. Allen and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe and Mrs. Miller) shoot both sides of Melinda in pretty much the same long-shot, long-take, tableau style he has favored for decades. They ignore Charlie Chaplin’s wise advice that comedy is a long-shot, but tragedy is close-up—and ignore as well the great face-up style of his old idol Ingmar Bergman. It’s a shame Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who has shot some Allen pictures), was physically unable to photograph at least half of this one—or that Allen didn’t have the chutzpah to join Melinda’s ‘two faces’ in a parody of the iconic split-screen shot in Persona,” wrote Michael Wilmington in his Chicago Tribune review of Melinda and Melinda, March 22, 2005, a review that seemed as generous as it is intelligent, and as intelligent as it is entertaining. Wilmington is aware of aesthetic choices, the resources of technique. I do wonder if having, in visual terms, two obviously different schemes would have been playing to a desire for easy differentiation. Why should Allen follow other directors’ dictates about comedy and tragedy and their requirements, when he has his own style? Allen places individuals—no matter how intense or idiosyncratic—within particular physical and social environments; and close-ups exaggerate the importance of individual experience: it’s one thing for an individual to think his experience is of overwhelming importance and another thing, an unlikely thing, for the world to agree (and yet the fallacy of the primacy of individuality is what we often crave to see reflected). To read a group of reviews about a film by writers such as Michael Wilmington, David Denby, and David Sterritt, among others, is to create a conversation in one’s head between each critic and one’s own responses and also to create a conversation among the various critics about the film. The more favorable reviews of Melinda and Melinda seem to grant Woody Allen his distinctive vision, his artistic license; and the least favorable seem to impose rigid, or merely reflexive, standards. Is Woody Allen’s own artistic individuality being rejected? Wilmington’s speculations, however, come out of enthusiasm and respect.

The New Yorker’s David Denby declared in the magazine’s March 21, 2005 issue that Allen’s “desire that everything look and sound lovely overcomes any sort of practical sense of how to make the material work dramatically. The extraordinary handsomeness not only makes the stories hard to tell apart; it outclasses the principal characters, who are almost all shallow, nattering, self-seeking people. They fall in and out of love, but their passions seem abrupt and rather arbitrary; they spend much of their time complaining about themselves or the others. In the absence of satirical intention or strong dramatic action, we are left with such cranky questions as: Why put two failed actors in the movie? What’s learned from the doubling?” Denby’s comment seems observant but not probing enough and a little unfair (surely he’s noticed that most of us spend our lives complaining about other people). It’s arguable that the film’s two failed actors—other than being a coincidence of storytelling—exist to emphasize that when fame or money are considered before talent, many people are sidelined, not allowed to work, though there are indications that Lee is, or once was, a more genuine artist than Hobie (Hobie is pleased when he gets selected for a product advertising spot). Artists who do not have the satisfaction of work then may find it hard to live; and those not as well-placed as Lee might become beggars, thieves, suicides, or even worse: they might be forced to give up their art for mundane work. I wonder if we really know who Lee is—as a dissatisfied artist, an artist who is not finding fulfillment in his work, Lee is not really being himself. Lee drinks instead of works, and Melinda falls for the wrong men and makes impulsive, destructive choices: aren’t these scenarios—about human vulnerability and error—ones most people could understand regardless of economic class? The idea that the passions in Allen’s film are any more arbitrary than in most films is questionable: how often do we believe in the love stories that are presented to us? What we bring rather than belief is often the suspension of disbelief. I can think of many stories I’ve read and seen and then thought, But those two didn’t actually say anything to each other, and they haven’t actually discovered anything interesting in each other, so what could compel them to be together other than the plot? In Melinda and Melinda, there is Melinda’s beauty and sensuality, Ellis’s charm and talent, and Laurel’s sensitivity and talent: and, consequently, the attractions are more understandable.

David Sterritt, in his post as film viewer and commentator for The Christian Science Monitor (March 18, 2005), wrote, “The good news about Melinda and Melinda is that it shows real reflection on Allen’s part, mostly about tensions between optimism and pessimism.” However Sterritt said that the “bad news about Melinda and Melinda is that its milieu is again limited to the urban middle class, the only stratum of society Allen’s body of work ever examines. And you won’t find many laughs here, even when he strives hardest for high comedy.” It may be that the urban middle class, as Allen presents it, does not suffer a great deal from what comes from the outside world but these people do suffer from what comes from within: and we see how often we—his people, and everyone—cause our own trouble. If I lacked any interest in that milieu, I doubt I’d find this or any film about it amusing. Could Sterritt, who has a professional and public career, be as indifferent as he seems? Does he have a preference for stories about the working class, or the poor? (What do intelligent and practical poor people want but money to improve their quality of life—which may well lead them or more likely their children to looking and sounding like the people in Woody Allen movies?) How interesting are stories about people with few, if any, choices? Is there drama in that—or merely a predictable fate and an attendant fatalism? It is some kind of potential or power—charm or energy or intelligence or passion or wealth—that makes choice and also drama possible.

Although The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson found the film’s opening gambit pretentious, he thought that the film’s “details are so complex and interconnected, it becomes more comfortable to let it all wash over you and simply appreciate the passing pleasures. These amount to two things: the performers and Allen’s jokes. Thus, you can find yourself admiring the Venetian-blind sultriness of Sevigny’s eyes, Ejiofor’s robust masculinity and most pleasurably of all, Ferrell, whose intrinsic goofiness is a constant tickle” (March 25, 2005). I’m not sure what to make of the word pretentious: are the characters in that opening scene, two playwrights and their friends, pretending to have interests they do not genuinely have; do they have ambitions beyond their skills (how do you develop skills without trying?); or are they being too earnest; or is the use of the situation to frame two possible stories, two possible ways of being in and seeing the world, too formal and too overt? The word pretentious seems to be a whip that is used to keep people in line in a culture that is enthusiastically dumb. One finds the notation that the film’s details are complex and that it’s work to follow those details and better to simply bask in the simple appeal of a performer’s face or manner or an obvious joke very telling: this is an inadvertent admission of intellectual lassitude. We all have moments of laziness, but part of what makes criticism fun and useful is that it can make sense of what we have read or seen, of what we have experienced (and allows us to enter the experience again with a greater sense of its richness); and it’s not asking too much to have a critic be attentive. While it’s true that the public or social rewards for appreciating a well-established director are slight (there’s more cultural momentum to be gained from championing novices), and one can feel one’s power affirmed by damaging or destroying the reputation of someone distinguished, the real aim of criticism is different—is insight and reverie.

“There’s a dirty little secret about the movies that no one wants to acknowledge—that we moviegoers soon get sick and tired of seeing the same old people up there on the screen, even if they’re good or great,” wrote Andrew Sarris, in his March 28, 2005 New York Observer review of Melinda and Melinda. Sarris, after quickly summarizing Allen’s career, calls Melinda and Melinda a conceptual disaster, pretentious and banal; and he suggests that rather than comedy or tragedy, parody is Allen’s strong suit. “If there is one narrative device favored by Mr. Allen, it is betrayal—largely because his characters seldom have anything else to do, particularly his too often merely decorative women characters. There are no struggles for money, social position, fame, political goals, much less sheer survival. So betrayal becomes the only alternative to endlessly platitudinous table conversations,” wrote Sarris. Merely decorative women characters? No struggles for money, fame, or social position? The women in this film have interests that are personal and professional. Comic Melinda seeks work in an art gallery and tragic Melinda talks about the possibility of doing decorating work. Laurel is a music teacher with abandoned ambitions that haven’t been excised from memory; Susan is a film producer with an extreme though unspecified viewpoint about men in her work, and she’s willing to make sacrifices to get her film made; and the two male actors presented as characters certainly have ambitions and frustrations. Radha Mitchell, in one of her interviews, spoke about all the interesting actresses Allen has introduced and reintroduced to the world. (Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Meryl Streep, Charlotte Rampling, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Gena Rowlands, Blythe Danner, Angelica Huston, Judy Davis, Elisabeth Shue, and Charlize Theron are some of the actresses who have appeared in his films.) I am inclined to trust the judgments of an actress about a director’s use of women, especially this actress, Mitchell, who has made her strongest impressions in High Art, directed by a woman, Lisa Cholodenko, and in this film, Melinda and Melinda, directed by Woody Allen. Regarding Allen’s use of betrayal as a subject, it’s arguable that in every kind of relationship there is the possibility of loyalty or betrayal, care or neglect: and that may make it a subject that everyone can relate to.

“Infidelity is one of Woody Allen’s favorite subjects, which is understandable: It makes a convenient hat rack for his various neuroses,” asserted Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek (March 18, 2005), before concluding that Allen “seems to understand nothing about infidelity, or maybe even marriage, at least dramatically speaking. Instead of allowing us to sympathize with both characters in at least some small way, in any equation of marital infidelity Allen always has to have a clear-cut bad guy. In the case of Peet and Ferrell, the equation is wife/hard, husband/gentle. In real life, and in intelligent, heartfelt movies, the lines aren’t always so clearly drawn.” Zacharek’s analysis of the film is more scorching than most, and one could argue that Woody Allen specializes in soft men (he has spoken of his aversion to casting too handsome, too macho Hollywood types); and that he sees women not as hard but as strong. He, as are most artists, is interested in emotion and he shows men of feeling and women with a wide range of feelings and aptitudes. (There is an aspect of Allen’s own persona that is that of a universal androgyne, something many great artists posess.) Laurel and Cassie are two wives who are not hard, career-oriented, or selfish. Would it be preferable to have Amanda Peet play a self-denying woman, lacking in ambition? or someone who felt guilty about her ambition, and resigned to stay in a marriage in which desire had dwindled? Amanda Peet plays a woman who seems true to life to me. It’s possible to imagine Peet’s Susan as more nuanced, as more anguished about her marriage—but is it necessary, and is it true to this kind of person? I don’t think so; and I think that Zacharek’s disqualification, in this case, has more to do with taste than truth.

“Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness,” judged Richard Corliss in Time magazine (March 21, 2005). Where Richard Corliss sees cliché, A.O. Scott sees tradition.

The New York Times’s A.O. Scott wrote, “Mr. Allen pries his actors away from their naturalistic habits, evoking a pre-Method style of performance that has all but vanished from the modern stage and screen. The results are mixed. Ms. Sevigny, Mr. Ejiofor and Ms. Peet seem liberated, freed of the necessity to plumb psychological depths and able to explore behavior rather than motive. Mr. Miller, struggling with an underwritten part and a badly fitting accent, has a harder time, as does Mr. Ferrell, who is miscast in the Woody Allen surrogate role of soulful schlemiel” (The Times, March 18, 2005). I think Scott’s observation is perceptive, as there was a moment when I was watching a couple of scenes in the film when it occurred to me that the film was also concerned with manners and personal style—and that each is influenced by thought as well as economic class—and that this made the film similar to Scorsese’s (and Edith Wharton’s) The Age of Innocence and Terence Davies’s (and Wharton’s) House of Mirth or various Henry James stories, though of course it does not have—and wasn’t intended to have—the same depth. I did like Jonny Lee Miller, especially upon reflection (I’m also rather deaf to accents)—when people are unfulfilled they take up less space than they should; and Miller as Lee projects a worried practicality and a shameless though not particularly sensual sexual availability, as well as hurt and deceit, while still being opaque. Unlike the performers Scott has named as successful within Allen’s scheme, Ferrell, though he is obviously capable of sensitivity and sweetness, does not seem to embody a well-rooted style of being, of thinking or moving among others, and so I didn’t sense him as belonging to a time or place.

“Ferrell’s line delivery is formed precisely in Allen’s image. As in most recent Allen movies, there’s always one male character who’s carefully groomed to be the Woody stand-in, and Ferrell, although he can’t help being extremely likable, suffers for that here,” wrote Stephanie Zacharek in Salon (March 18, 2005).

The Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter’s commentary (March 23, 2005), amidst a brutal review, echoed this: “In many of the films Woody Allen has made of late—now that critics have informed him he’s too old to fail with a better class of woman—he uses a kind of Woody surrogate, who apes his trademark neurotic East Side delivery and gets all the wisecracks at his own expense. Actors as diffuse as Kenneth Branagh (Celebrity), John Cusack (Bullets Over Broadway) and Jason Biggs (Anything Else) have had a try at this. What you see is someone imitating Woody Allen on screen—the anxiety attack, the clammy desperation, the self-doubt—but you want the real thing, and any impersonation grows tiring after a while. Poor guy: If he casts himself, everybody says, ‘Who wants to see that old man kiss Tea Leoni? Ew.’ And if he casts someone else everybody says, ‘Who wants to see Will Ferrell play Woody Allen?’” [Hunter sees and sneers at the film’s traces of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary and Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, a film of an act-by-act rehearsal of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, which balanced comedy and tragedy and is about traditional values and changing times and focuses on a retired professor who returns with his young wife to the family farm being run by his brother, Vanya, and Vanya and a local doctor , who is a drinker, both become infatuated with the young woman. Such traces are no—t difficult to find as the characters mention Madame Bovary and Uncle Vanya: and one wonders why intelligent references should be resented in a cultural work that features educated people. We did not invent misery, and acknowledging that—by referring to other people’s suffering and to art—is a remembrance that is part of whatever sanity we have. Even if those references do not mean much to a particular viewer, they still say something about the context of the characters, just as medical or legal or political references would be expected in works featuring certain characters or situations. Hunter says also that by presenting two narratives, a comedy and a drama, Allen failed at two movies simultaneously, and admits he has found most of Allen’s recent work “unmemorable.”]

David Walsh, the film reviewer for the World Socialist Web Site, began his April 6, 2005 review by stating that “it has been 13 years since Allen produced a work, Husbands and Wives, that was worth something as a whole.” Walsh—whose work I respect despite his recent contemptuous dismissal of Godard’s Notre Musique—finds that both the comic and the dramatic narratives in Melinda and Melinda lack impact, and says “Characters appear, seem to carry a certain dramatic weight, and disappear, without anything having been established about their presence.” (Is Allen being faulted for producing a work that’s not insistently ponderous?) Walsh says that Allen never had much to say about the world at large, and thinks that after Ronald Reagan and Rudolph Guiliani, Allen’s own preferred world—the world he attempts to recreate in his film—no longer exists, that New Yorkers no longer share his intellectual preoccupations, his liberalism, or even his style. Some might claim that Allen’s intellectual preoccupations, liberalism, and style are embodiments of what he has to say about the world, and will—in his art—outlive a didactic political ideology evolved to address specific social problems, a claim I could not contest.

New York magazine’s Ken Tucker wrote, “Allen is onto something interesting when he has Jonny Lee Miller remark that ‘life is all about networking’; who is a greater expert on gatherings of Manhattan intellectuals? In contrast to the yearning artists Allen has sketched in the past, Miller’s and Sevigny’s characters are at once more cynical and more desperate, and it would be fascinating to see how a shrewd pro like Allen explores this Gen-X/Y cliché from his older, savvy perspective: Is the present generation more honest or more devious about their avariciousness? But, alas, he lets the notion drop away” (New York magazine, March 28, 2005 issue). If a generation is cynical and desperate, might that be because of larger social and political changes, as David Walsh indicated? And don’t we see values expressed in choices, in acts? (I don’t think Allen let anything drop.) Unhappiness—which can be poisonous—is also a sign of yearning, and yearning is not rooted in cynicism but in belief.