Sky K Studios Movie Blog

Melinda and Melinda

I'm a huge sucker for Woody Allen. The man, to me, is one of the best chroniclers of humanity in all of our inanity. Another way of saying all this, to be sure, is that for at least a decade he's been a near-constant disappointment. The Woody of the 90s seemed to stop dealing with the issues that showed him to be the genius he can sometimes be, or when he did try to tackle them, he did it poorly and/or offensively. So I've seen a gradual lowering of my own expectations every subsequent time I go see one of his films.

What a treat, then, to leave a Woody Allen film for the first time in as long as I can remember, and not simply shrug it off as another miss.

First, let's do some categorization. By and large, Woody is a comedian, but there's comedy and then there's comedy. In what we'll call his Group A movies (this is an attempt to group, not to heirarchize, though I probably wouldn't dispute a rough lining up of the two), are the works such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Comedy, yes, but serious comedy: here, Woody struggles with serious existential and interpersonal issues. (I'd argue this is also Woody at his best, but for the moment let's keep to theme.) Since Hannah (1986), he's picked up this thread a few times, not with any great results. I liked 1992's Husbands & Wives more than most did, but the warmth and good nature evident in his earlier Class A works was gone. The shrillness and vitriol of H&W then hit its apex in 1997's Deconstructing Harry: Woody at his most hateful and, yes, mysoginistic. Other than these two entries, I don't think anything since Hannah has really picked up these Class A threads.

So what the hell else has the Stephen King of film been making in all his prolificness? Silly comedies, or what I'll call his Class B films. This is a lot of what he's known for, and often for good reason. Here's where he started his career, and it's been his touchstone: the best of the Class B include Love & Death, Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway. Just about everything he's done in the past decade has fallen into this group. This isn't surprising, but these have struck me as mere placeholder films-- he's doing something, you know what you're going to get with them, but they're pretty forgettable. Curse of the Jade Scorpion? Small Time Crooks? Celebrity? Everyone Says I Love You? Are these standout films for anyone? About the only reason to see them is to see how Kenneth Branaugh or Ed Norton will play the obligatory Woody stand-in role.

Of course, there's no bright line separating Class A from Class B-- the silly comedies have plenty of seriousness in them, and the more serious works have plenty of silliness in them. So maybe I am categorizing based on quality after all-- maybe Class A is just the group of films that work (even if they are offensive). But the Class B films have a feeling of formula to them: a situation is set up and the players are put in motion. The Class A films feel more driven by characters than by plot.

(Let's leave alone for now the Class C films -- his "dark trio" of Bergman-inspired films: Interiors, September and Another Woman. And let's also acknowledge that a (very) few films do not fall neatly into this categorization, including some good works like Crimes & Misdemeanors and Shawdows & Fog.)

So we've always assumed that Woody would return at some point to a real Class A work, and that he would do it in a way that wasn't filled with bile. I'm pleased to say that with Melinda and Melinda, he's finally done that. Does it rank up there with Annie Hall or Hannah? Hells no. But he has definitely picked up on the same themes, and done it with the same humanity.

The conceit (as if you don't know) is that a comedist and a tragedist (both playwrights) are arguing over whether life is essentially comic or tragic. They each take the same set of basic facts (suicide attempts, faltering marriages, deception, lust, frustrated artists, and of course a black piano player who amazingly manages not to be named Sam) and each spins out his own version of the story. Two sets of characters, two parallel tales-- one comic, one tragic.

(Parenthetical shout out to Will Ferrell, who does two very impressive things here: first, he does comedy with pathos and in a way that is not cartoonish-- in contrast to most of the shit he does. Second, he plays the obligatory Woody stand-in role better than anyone in a really long time: he conveys the anxiety, and the mix of self-importance and self-loathing without falling back on a cliche Woody Allen imitation.)

Probably what keeps this film from being among his best works is its modesty of goals. Instead of positing answers, Woody seems to be exploring the ambiguity. Of course life isn't comic or tragic-- we have both. So in setting up the conceit through a frame story, Woody tells us exactly what he's about to do, and then he does it. It's great to see the stories play out, but once the frame is given, we know exactly what he's going to be doing for the next hundred minutes. And he does it well. But there's no real moment of redemption. No "you've got to have a little faith in people." No epiphany while watching Duck Soup (though that moment does have its revival house analogue here).

The lack of such a moment is only half a problem, though. Because those revalatory moments (throw in the end of Annie Hall, also) are revalatory in that they finally embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty. It's Woody shrugging off any real answers: "Knowability? Verifiability? Real truths?" you can hear the one-time philosophy student saying, "Forget it-- let's try just hanging onto decency and humanity, because we'll have our hands full with that alone." So the seeds of Melinda and Melinda's ambiguity are there, have been there for decades. Which brings us back to the modesty-of-enterprise issue.

But screw it. No one, not even Woody Allen, can be Woody Allen every time out. Let's just be thankful that this time, he was. He wasn't his best self, not by a long shot, but after a long, dry and painful decade, he is back.

posted by Jon Z at 10:32 AM