“Very often people avoid making value judgements, but I think the opposite. I think it’s very important to make them; it’s almost an obligation.”
—Woody Allen to Stig Bjorkman, while discussing Crimes and Misdemeanors

“I’m not a believer in the specialness of the artist. I don’t think that to have a talent is an achievement. I think it’s a gift from God, sort of. I do think that if you’re lucky to have a talent, that with that comes a certain responsibility. Just in the same sense as if you were born rich.”
—Woody Allen to Bjorkman, while discussing Shadows and Fog

Woody Allen’s Melinda & Melinda is a comedy and a drama, a dialectical film, born of an intellectual argument between friends who seem part of an ideal New York. It is a New York of comfort and culture, of money and means, of nerve and neuroses. Central figures in the film are two musicians, who are also black, and played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Daniel Sunjata, musicians whose antecedents might be the classical pianists Andre Watts or Awadagin Pratt, or further back the jazz pianists Billy Strayhorn or Erroll Garner—or even further back: Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799). De Saint-Georges, born in Guadeloupe the son of a black slave woman named Anne and a French nobleman, became a composer who was one of the most celebrated figures of his day. Joseph’s father’s wife seems to have been accepting of her husband’s mistress and son; and Joseph’s father entered him in a fencing academy in France, in which he also studied music. Joseph would master harp and violin, composing in a wide range of classical forms such as concertos and symphonies, and he performed for and was befriended by royalty. He also formed a group to benefit people of African ancestry. Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, acted as a National Guard colonel, during and on behalf of the French Revolution, with his lieutenant being (an ultimately fair-weather friend) Alexandre Dumas, the father of the Three Musketeers writer Alexandre Dumas. When De Saint-Georges died of a bladder infection, newspapers mourned him. I saw an illustration of him while walking in the Metropolitan Museum. While exceptional, Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, is one of those exceptions that make history and make of history inspiration and use: such a figure embodies and fulfills the possibilities of civilization. In one of Woody Allen’s earlier films, Manhattan, Allen used the black singer and pianist Bobby Short as a sign of Manhattan sophistication. Bobby Short may not, at first, seem worthy of comparison to Saint-Georges, but his repertoire included Cole Porter, Noel Coward, and Stephen Sondheim, and Short ultimately became one of the few blacks listed in the Social Register, the address book of America’s elite. None of this is as unusual as some might think, as it is often people from the provinces who most appreciate and most thoroughly appropriate the abundant possibilities of the city. That partly explains Woody Allen’s own sensibility. Allen, who was born in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn, has described himself as growing up in a neighborhood that was Jewish and working-class, and said that he found a great refuge in the movies. The flowers in spring, the robins that sing, the sunbeams that shine, they’re yours, they’re mine (lines from “The Best Things in Life are Free” by B.G. DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson)—and while the movies weren’t free, they were cheap: and overwhelming in their difference from the life Woody Allen knew, giving him a vision of a life he wanted.

Woody Allen, who likes European classical composers such as Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Mozart, Beethoven, and Erik Satie, has said, “Jazz is a big thing with me. My favorite kinds of music are jazz and classical. It’s a very big passion of mine, to play it. I’m an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I’ve loved it so much. I’ve listened to so much of it and read so much about it and played it a lot. And I find in my movies, I like my old personal feelings to inform the movie, and so it’s jazz and classical music,” in an interview with Julian Roman that appeared on Movieweb.com in March 2005. I’m having myself a time, wrote Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, I mean I’m having what I want, wanting what I have, doing what I like, and liking what I do, and I’m having myself a time. In conversation with Stig Bjorkman (Woody Allen on Woody Allen; 267), Woody Allen admitted, “I’ve always wanted to make a jazz movie. And I think I could do a good one. But the concept that I have for it would be very, very expensive. So I’ve just tabled it and put it back in my mind. It would just cost too much money. It would be a film that would start quite early and go from early New Orleans through Chicago and New York and Paris. You know, it’s a big deal. Costumes, recreation of things. It could be wonderful, but I can’t do it for less than a lot of money.” Melinda and Melinda’s soundtrack contains a medley and other work by Dick Hyman, a jazz pianist who has worked with Woody Allen often (Hyman wrote songs for Zelig, for instance). Melinda and Melinda’s soundtrack also includes Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” and Ellington’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” and “In A Mellow Tone,” and Erroll Garner’s “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “Somebody Stole My Gal,” and “Will You Still Be Mine?” and Stravinsky’s “Concerto in D for String Orchestra: 2. Arioso: Andantino,” Bartok’s “String Quartet No. 4,” and Bach’s “Prelude 2 Well Tempered Clavier.”

It is the sound of Allen’s films as well as their look and their unique conversation—intellectual and joking, personal and social, ambitious and stuck in the mires of lust and pain and self-consciousness—that make him an imitable filmmaker, someone whose work gives amusement, provokes thought, and is considered to have lasting and historical value. Woody Allen saw the films of comic directors and comedians such as Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton when he was a boy; and Allen is on record for his adult admiration of the film directors Jean Renoir, Kurosawa, Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut, as well as more immediate contemporaries such as Godard and Scorsese and Coppola. Allen admires the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, and has said that he wished that he had their talent for drama. (Allen also likes poets such as William Butler Yeats, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Rainer Maria Rilke.) Allen’s taste is wide-ranging: he enjoys Jerry Lewis, the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Rock, and Margaret Cho, among others; but he’s not confused about his high art preferences. “There’s a very influential school of film criticism in the United States that’s populist. And I think that’s not good. There’s a number of critics, intellectual critics, who are extremely skeptical and critical of, let’s say, the fine European works and of fine works in general, but gush tremendously over populist junk films. I won’t mention names, but there are a number of film-directors around who make very popular films, and they’re delightful films. But to extol them the way they do and to find meaning in them is not right,” Allen told Stig Bjorkman, Woody Allen on Woody Allen (195).

Woody Allen, once known to his parents and grade school teachers as Allen Konigsberg, has directed more than thirty films, and some of them include: a film now in post-production that is currently called Match Point, starring Scarlett Johansson, and Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Celebrity (1998), Deconstructing Harry (1997), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Husbands and Wives (1992), Shadows and Fog (1992), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), New York Stories (“Oedipus Wrecks,” 1989), Another Woman (1988), September (1987), Radio Days (1987), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Zelig (1983), Manhattan (1979), Interiors (1978), Annie Hall (1977), Love and Death (1975), Sleeper (1973), Bananas (1971), and Take the Money and Run (1969).

There are many books devoted to Woody Allen’s work, such as The Films of Woody Allen by Sam B. Girgus and Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: Woody Allen’s Comedy by Foster Hirsch, but to get a sense of Allen’s warm critical reception and prestige one need only look at a couple of reviews printed in The New York Times from the last few decades. Vincent Canby, April 25, 1979: “Manhattan, Woody Allen’s extraordinarily fine and funny new film, is about many things, including a time and place where fashion probably blights more lives, more quickly, than any amounts of booze, drugs, radioactive fallout, and saturated animal fats. In this Manhattan, it’s no longer a question of keeping up, but of staying ahead. The person on this week’s cover is a leading candidate for next year’s feature story that asks, ‘Whatever happened to…?’” Vincent Canby, February 7, 1986: “Hannah and Her Sisters is the movie he’s been working toward ever since Annie Hall, Interiors and Manhattan. It’s both a summation of a career to date, as well as a window on a career to come. It’s warmhearted, wise and fiercely funny, demonstrating a rigorous command of a talent that, in the manner of Jack’s prodigious beanstalk, won’t stop growing.” Canby concludes that review with, “Mr. Allen has become the urban poet of our anxious age—skeptical, guiltily bourgeois, longing for answers to impossible questions, but not yet willing to chuck a universe that can produce the Marx Brothers.” Vincent Canby, September 18, 1992: “Husbands and Wives—the entire Allen canon, for that matter—represents a kind of personal cinema for which there is no precedent in modern American movies.” Canby’s successor Janet Maslin, September 30, 1994: Maslin wrote that in Bullets over Broadway, Allen “successfully reinvents himself as comic philosopher, finding wicked humor in questions of artistic life or death.” Janet Maslin, December 12, 1997: “Deconstructing Harry, his angriest film since Stardust Memories and also his most viciously funny, lets Mr. Allen expand on a thought raised less directly in Bullets Over Broadway: that the person ruled by creative imagination may be indifferent, not to say ruinous, to the happiness of those around him. And that even if he wreaks havoc, maybe he thinks he has no choice.”

Woody Allen participated in a series of conversations with Stig Bjorkman, a journalist and filmmaker, for the book called Woody Allen on Woody Allen (Grove, New York, 1995; originally published in 1993 in Sweden by Alfabeta Bokforlag as Woody on Allen). Allen declared that “what the writer does—the filmmaker or the writer—you create a world that you would like to live in. You like the people you create. You like what they wear, where they live, how they talk, and it gives you a chance for some months to live in that world. And those people move to beautiful music, and you’re in that world. So in my films I just feel there’s always a pervasive feeling of the greatness of idealized life or fantasy versus the unpleasantness of reality” (51). The world Allen creates remains one that many actors feel privileged to enter, even though it may be strange to them. Chloe Sevigny talked in an interview not only about how precise the Melinda and Melinda film script was but about how articulate Allen was on set (she brought a dictionary so she could understand his vocabulary).

Allen’s film characters are often comfortable in many aspects of their lives and yet they yearn for more—a happiness or success they can imagine but do not yet have, the quest for which can be the core of comedy or drama. Comedy affirms pleasure; it facilitates communication—and it can be also a way of advancing an independent viewpoint. Comedy allows one to say the unsayable under the cover of lightness, of jest. Often drama allows us to follow an intense emotion to its apparently logical conclusion—in self-expression, in public or social acceptance, in personal fulfillment; or in conflict, disappointment, and dissolution of relationships. Tragedy requires usually the pursuit of an ideal that leads one to forfeit what one had; and often it involves women who follow men, are betrayed by men, and in turn exact a terrible vengeance, usually killing the man and whatever he loves. Tragedy frequently involves misunderstanding—of self, of the beloved, of the enemy, and of nature and life.

Melinda and Melinda presents the testing of friendship and marriage by disloyalty and adultery, as well as indulgence in drugs and alcohol, and the temptation toward madness and murder, but these are offered less as cause for easy sensation than as acknowledgement of some of the facts of social life amid the glimmers of hope and the glamour of achievement.

Melinda and Melinda stars Radha Mitchell and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Jonny Lee Miller, Amanda Peet, Chloe Sevigny, Wallace Shawn, Brooke Smith, and Daniel Sunjata. Radha Mitchell has been featured in Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), High Art (1998), Pitch Black (2000), Cowboys and Angels (2002), Ten Tiny Love Stories (2001), Phone Booth (2002), Man on Fire (2004), and Finding Neverland (2004); and a film featuring her, now called Mozart and the Whale, is expected to open later in 2005. Woody Allen was impressed by Radha Mitchell’s performance in Ten Tiny Love Stories; and Phone Booth with Colin Ferrell and Man on Fire with Denzel Washington and Finding Neverland with Johnny Depp introduced the Australian Mitchell to mainstream filmgoers; but it was High Art, in which she played a young woman who becomes infatuated with an older somewhat jaded woman photographer, that impressed discerning viewers several years ago. Radha Mitchell’s performance in High Art was intuitive and intelligent: she conveyed what it’s like to be awakened to art and erotic experience by a stranger—and her character was, suitably, persuasively, curious, passionate, unsure; and one felt as if one perceived her character’s deepest being. Mitchell, as Melinda, is the only actor to appear in both of Melinda and Melinda’s narratives.

Melinda and Melinda begins on a rainy night in a small, busy Manhattan restaurant, Pastis, with a discussion between dining friends about whether life is basically tragic or comic and why people respond to art that is tragic or comic: the comic playwright played by Wallace Shawn says that life is tragic; and the playwright of serious dramas, Max (Larry Pine), says that philosophers say—and he agrees—that life is absurd. It’s not an inappropriate topic for dinner on a rainy night with smart friends, including Neil Pepe, the founder of the Atlantic Theater Company, as Al, and Stephanie Roth Haberle as Louise (Roth Haberle was in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending in 2002, and Deconstructing Harry and Crimes and Misdemeanors, as well as various classic plays such as The Cherry Orchard, King Lear, Oedipus, and Twelfth Night). The two principal talkers are Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine, and Shawn has appeared in more than seventy films, including Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Shadows and Fog, and the Louis Malle-directed My Dinner with Andre, which Shawn co-wrote with Andre Gregory. (Shawn wrote The Designated Mourner, which David Hare directed.) Pine has been in many films too, including Woody Allen’s Celebrity, and also the Malle-directed Vanya on 42nd Street in 1994, in which Pine played the doctor, and Pine has appeared in movies such as The Door in the Floor, Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler, The Ice Storm, and Dead Man Walking. The four, Shawn, Pine, Pepe and Roth Haberle, create an atmosphere of camaraderie and seriousness in the restaurant as the rain falls outside. (Allen has acknowledged that rain is a recurring element in his films, and that he himself prefers cloudy days and rain to sunlight: he finds rain beautiful.) Tragedy confronts, and comedy escapes, says Shawn’s character, Sy. Another man at the table, Al, introduces a story about a woman who unexpectedly visits friends, and the story is taken up by the playwright of gloomy dramas—with Melinda, played by Radha Mitchell, hesitating before entering the spacious, intricately decorated downtown loft apartment of her college friends, played by Chloe Sevigny as Laurel and Jonny Lee Miller as Lee, who are in the midst of a dinner party that includes the director of a project that the actor Lee wants to appear in. Lee and his wife talk about his hopes—he may not get the part as he’s not yet a known name—as they prepare food and refreshment. “We’re living beyond our means,” admits Lee. I never could save a dime, and so I’m living like a lord, acting like a loon, lying in the sun, and sighing in the moon, and I’m having myself a time. Lee mentions that his wife cries while listening to Mahler, a special sensitivity to music—she is a musician who has given up the possibility of a performing career in order to teach—that will have meaning as the story unfolds. (The visiting director has heard in Lee and Laurel’s apartment a piece of music he wants to use in his work: out of accidents—as much as design—art is made.) When Melinda arrives, nervous, a bit sweaty, from a long bus trip, which indicates that she doesn’t have a lot of money, she says that she looks like the wreck of the Hesperus. (“The Wreck of the Hesperus” is the name of a poem by Longfellow about a schooner skipper who takes his daughter with him to sea, and a night storm arises of lightning, thunder, and high waves, and despite the daughter’s prayers, death comes.) Melinda smokes nervously and asks for champagne or white wine or single-malt scotch, the first two seeming a grasp for elegance and the last a residual detail, an acquired taste, from a past relationship; and her presence is confounding to Laurel’s husband Lee, who tells the other guests that Melissa has always been troubled (“crazy,” he says) and that she had been expected in months past but hadn’t shown.

Wallace Shawn’s playwright Sy sees the story of Melinda as a comedy taking place on the east side of Manhattan, involving a film director wife and an out-of-work actor husband. They too are having a dinner party, attended by a real estate baron the wife wants to invest in her film, an all-women piece called The Castration Sonata. The real estate man asks for single-malt scotch, which the apartment doesn’t have and when the film-director wife Susan, played by Amanda Peet, returns from the store to get it, she meets on the stairs Melinda, the comic Melinda, who soon interrupts their gourmet dinner party for which a delicious meal is being cooked by the actor Hobie, played by Will Ferrell. Melinda announces that she has taken twenty-eight sleeping pills. Melinda’s drowsy and nauseous and while people come to her aid, dinner burns, and the assembled end up ordering Chinese food.

The film moves back and forth between the comic narrative and the dramatic. Laurel and tragic Melinda talk about Melinda’s troubles, her attempts to kill herself, her being confined to a state mental hospital, and her current condition (“I’m a little fragile when everything closes in,” she says). Laurel’s husband Lee is anxious that Melinda not stay with them very long. He thinks it foolish for Melinda to have had an affair when she was married to a successful doctor with connections (the doctor subsequently forbade her from seeing her children). “Life is networking,” says Lee. (That seems a simplification but, these days, I often think that to get what one wants one either has to have power or serve power and all else is chance. Is that a simplification? Or is it—if it’s what the patterns of daily life seem to prove—a fact?) Melinda says she became bored being a doctor’s wife—like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who bored with her marriage, began an affair and spent her husband’s money on her lover, and, fearful of being found out, committed suicide. Melinda describes her own deteriorating marriage, and the man she met who swept her off her feet, John San Guiliano. Her husband hired a private detective and the evidence of the affair gave him ammunition against her—and later her lover, after taking her on an African safari, met someone else. Radha Mitchell is fine in these scenes—bringing a great intensity to her lines, suggesting a past with every haunted look and tremulous gesture; and the sympathy that Chloe Sevigny registers while listening is also appealing. (I haven’t seen Chloe Sevigny in much—I remember her from Dogville. She was in Kids in 1995, and then in Gummo, Last Days of Disco, Boys Don’t Cry, A Map of the World, American Psycho, The Brown Bunny, and Shattered Glass. I saw a couple of these films—Map, American Psycho—but her presence in them is not vivid now to me.) Here, Sevigny as Laurel has a sincerity that is constant, and she is photographed to look lovely. The character only has one very dramatic scene—when she’s arguing with her husband, angry at him for bringing another woman into their home—and she, otherwise, could have used a little more flair, a little more self-indulgence, partly to go with that lavish apartment, but she is likable, subtly touching.

When comic Melinda shares a meal with her new acquaintances, Hobie and Susan and their friends, Melinda describes the job she’s applying for at an art gallery, and her visit becomes part of one of those odd but pleasant New York evenings some people have. (In an interview Chloe Sevigny voiced her admiration for Amanda Peet’s performance as Susan, noting how the actress busied herself onscreen.) When the party’s over, Hobie and his wife have tense moments—she doesn’t want to have sex, and he notes that they rarely make love anymore (none of what Aristophanes called sweet wrestling in the dark).

Tragic Melinda’s friends Laurel and Cassie (Brooke Smith) meet for lunch and discuss arranging a meeting between Melinda and a nice dentist. Meanwhile, Lee is seducing one of his young female acting students in the family apartment. (Allen has spoken about the importance of locations, that he likes apartments to smell authentic. To see someone be unhappy in this great apartment seems nearly unfathomable.) Lee describes his wife to the girl as someone who shops and lunches and who has come from a long line of women who shop and lunch.

Woody Allen is familiar with that profile. “I live on the upper East Side of New York, which is very chic. When I used to pick up my children or deliver my children to school, I’d go there on a cold winter morning, and the other mothers would be bringing their kids to school, and there’d be fifteen mothers there in huge mink coats and sable coats. They live a very protected life and they have homes in Connecticut or the Hamptons and they live in designer apartments on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue. And they spend their days shopping and having lunches, and every now and then one of them will get into some kind of project with artists or writers or politicians. But it’s quite superficial. I don’t dislike those people. I don’t think they’re bad people. They have a certain kind of lifestyle, and I think it’s amusing,” said Allen to Bjorkman in Woody Allen on Woody Allen (227).

The young actress, one of Lee’s students, tells Lee he shouldn’t drink so early in the day, a warning that will have resonance later when his drinking is said to threaten his work. The girl asks him about his wife, Laurel, who had hoped to be a musician but who teaches music, and Lee says, “Life has a malicious way of dealing with great potential.” It is one of the really telling lines in the movie; and it is about both Laurel and Lee. Melinda stops by the apartment for a pick-me-up, probably drugs, and gets a glimpse of the girl; and, later, walking in Central Park with Cassie and Laurel, the three talk about when they were younger and thought they would have control and fulfillment in the future—and Melinda asks Laurel if she would change her life. (More than once people comment that Lee was a very desirable catch.) Laurel says, “Who wouldn’t profit from a second go-round?”

Allen’s characters think before they talk (something that makes them seem at once intelligent, well-mannered, and consequently anachronistic). There’s a formality to some of the dialog in the film; and a few of the actors say they found it intimidating even though Allen told them they could change it to make it more colloquial or comfortable. Allen has talked about the difference between literary dialog—intelligent, witty—that engages the mind and entertains, and more realistic—banal and believable—dialog that is functional and is used to create realistic personalities. There’s a mix of the two kinds of dialog in the film. Radha Mitchell inflects almost every line she has with compact and conflicted feelings. When her tragic Melinda is with Cassie and Laurel in Central Park and is trying to decide how to approach a dentist the two want to introduce her to, her going to and fro between possible strategies suggests many things, including a fundamental instability, a suggestion that anticipates what happens later.

After the real estate mogul decides to invest in Susan’s (Peet’s) film without Hobie as a featured actor (he’s not famous enough), Susan—sane, sensible, and ambitious but without much subterfuge—pleasantly accepts that decision though her husband is right for the part; and we know that she is someone who adapts to the world rather than expects the world to adapt to her: she is and will be a survivor. Meanwhile, comic Melinda returns from an interview and attends horse races with Hobie and his friend. Hobie has a pleasant time with Melinda, during which Melinda tells Hobie that she likes physical intimacy, often and creatively. Hobie is flustered, shy and excited, and Will Ferrell’s performance seems to have a few identifiable and somewhat contradictory modes—articulate and contemplative; physically tentative, awkward, in a way that doesn’t fit his height or weight or kind of sanity; and physically grasping, uncontrollably expressive, reaching and touching. (The last two modes do seem, as others have said, more like Allen than Ferrell. Why does Woody Allen feel compelled to inscribe his personality, including his physical mannerisms, in his films even when he is not physically present in them? Is it narcissism, or that his humor is so bound to his sensibility that it requires a Woody Allen figure to work? Whatever Allen’s limitations as an actor, Allen exudes a multi-faceted modern consciousness and Ferrell does not.) Hobie doesn’t tell his wife that he went to the races with Melinda, an omission that indicates he feels guilty. Melinda is set up with an adventurous dentist, Greg—someone who goes to Africa for safari, where he shoots large animals, which he has stuffed then displayed in his large white house in the Hamptons. Melinda and Greg double date with Hobie and his wife, and all have a pleasant time but Hobie, who makes Allenesque jokes that are subversive and self-deprecating.

Lee gets the part he wanted in an acting project, but when Laurel congratulates him his insecurity and anger make it hard for him to accept her well-intended congratulations. Obviously, it’s a bad sign for a relationship when people can’t be happy together even when they achieve their goals. That moment is one of the more sharp features in the dramatic narrative we see. When Lee and Laurel go home to prepare for the party Cassie is throwing, at which tragic Melinda will be introduced to the shy, stable dentist, Melinda fidgets over what to wear. She’s concerned about her looks, her weight and the circles under her eyes. Laurel warns her about taking too many pills on an empty stomach and drinking alcohol. At the party, Lee, a friendly drunk, suggests to Cassie that they have sex—he thinks it would be fun to have sex with a visibly pregnant woman, though Cassie’s husband disagrees. Tragic Melinda is bored by the dentist (who is not the energetic presence he is in comic Melinda’s narrative; and that the two narratives handle the same or similar figures and devices differently implies something about comedy and drama, and fact and fiction, and also interpretation. Characters in dramas may be motivated less by external phenomena than those in comedies; and, whereas in comedies characters may be surprised or bewildered by events, in dramas, rather than befuddlement, they are more likely to worry, to rage and to wound, led by temperament rather than circumstance).

Ellis Moonsong, a composer and pianist, is playing music at Cassie’s party. Cassie coaxes Laurel into sitting next to Ellis and playing a familiar piece; and while Laurel plays, Ellis goes to the bar, where Melinda is—Melinda has just rubbed an old lamp while making a wish. Ellis Moonsong calls Laurel a mysterious stranger who took over the piano (he endows Laurel with mystery, and he has mystery for Melinda); and he seems to have been conjured by the lamp. (Allen has remarked on his appreciation of critic Diane Jacob’s perception of the importance of magic in his films.)

Ellis, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, has written two operas, one performed at Yale and the other to be performed at the Santa Fe Opera House. He talks of the possibility of going to Barcelona or Paris. “We grab without thinking because we’re passionate people,” says Ellis, in response to Melinda’s somewhat glib but honest remark about the chaos of her life. He seems to be at once himself and calculating, both nervous and confident, someone destined for success. (Whether or not it was intended, the people who are overtly involved with work—Lee and Ellis and Susan—are the most interesting, though they do not at first appear to be the most interesting characters.) I am pleased to see Ejiofor in this film, since after seeing him in Dirty Pretty Things I worried that he would not get significant work and this Woody Allen film is very attractive exposure for him. Chiwetel Ejiofor, the London-born son of Nigerian parents, has been in Amistad (1997), Mind Games (2000), My Friend Soweto (2001), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Love Actually (2003), She Hate Me (2004), and Red Dust (2004), after reading Shakespeare’s work and becoming interested in theater when he was a boy and performing as a man with the Royal National Theatre in England.

Tragic Melinda is intrigued with Ellis. “You can’t go through life rubbing lamps and wishing,” says Laurel. “It doesn’t work,” she tells Melinda, while looking at her husband flirting with another woman. If it’s magic, then why can’t it be everlasting, like the sun that always shines? asked Stevland Morris (Stevie Wonder). Earlier at the party, Laurel told a guest that Lee has refused to do work for purely commercial reasons, an inclination that can only marginalize him in a capitalist culture. Is that part of his unhappiness, part of why he consistently pursues other women—alternative satisfactions?

Comic Melinda, after her drive with Greg, Hobie and Susan to the Hamptons, returns with a tick in her leg; and Hobie takes her to a hospital for its careful removal. (Will Ferrell as Hobie makes faces while the doctor removes the tick; and while there were moments that I liked Ferrell, there were also moments such as these when his performance seemed exaggerated and uncomfortable.)