A return to formula Melinda’s real tragedy is a lack of comedy BY BRETT MICHEL
	Melinda and Melinda Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Will Ferrell, Jonny Lee Miller, Radha Mitchell, Amanda Peet, Chloë Sevigny, Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn, and Steve Carell. A Fox Searchlight release (100 minutes). At the Avon.

Over the past few weeks, various media have suggested that Woody Allen’s latest is a "return to form." These reports have turned up with such regularity, in fact, that I’ve begun to sense the not entirely nimble fingers of the Fox Searchlight marketing machine straining behind the scenes. They needn’t have worked so hard. Melinda and Melinda is one of the better Woody Allen films of recent years.

That doesn’t make it a "return to form," of course. It’s more of a return to formula. Still, Melinda and Melinda is welcome after last year’s Anything Else. In the effort to attract a younger audience, Allen’s name was all but removed from that film’s advertising materials, which focused instead on lead Jason Biggs in a misguided attempt to capture a slice of the American Pie crowd. Which wasn’t hungry.

Watching Melinda and Melinda, you’ll recognize the basic ingredients from some of Allen’s past successes. Melinda could have walked off the set of 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters just as easily as the film’s dual-story set-up could have sprung from 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. But though Melinda shares some of Crimes’ themes of light and dark, it eschews much of the somber tone in its exploration of comedy and tragedy.

The film opens at a casual Upper East Side bistro, dropping us into a heated dinner conversation about nothing more than the meaning of life. Sy (Wallace Shawn, reprising his My Dinner with Andre ménage), one of two playwrights seated at the table, argues that life is largely comedy; Max (Larry Pine) rejects takes a more Ingmar Bergmanesque view. A third dining companion interrupts to relate an anecdote about a woman who (not unlike herself) disrupts a gathering of friends during a dinner party, setting in motion a series of events with far-reaching consequences. At the end of this tale, a question is posed: is this story a comedy or a tragedy? Are the two notions mutually exclusive? It’s here that the film begins to visualize the parallel stories of Melinda and Melinda (both played by Finding Neverland’s Radha Mitchell).

Tragic Melinda, just off a bus, is an old college acquaintance of her dinner hosts, married couple Laurel and Lee (Chloë Sevigny and Jonny Lee Miller). Arriving somewhat uninvited, months after she’s expected, Tragic Melinda soon becomes a disruptive, alcoholic force between the lives of the "Park Avenue Princess" and the once promising, now failing actor. As details about her past emerge, the film shifts gears slightly.

Which is to say, not enough. As we get to know Comic Melinda, and her hosts, indie-film director Susan (current film: The Castration Sonata) and her neurotic husband, failed actor Hobie (Amanda Peet and Will Ferrell, respectively), you may find yourself wishing that Allen and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond had devised separate visual styles, since it’s not always clear which story we’re watching. The differing musical styles help somewhat, but Mitchell, a talented actress in the Mia Farrow mold, isn’t given much room to create differing characterizations of the two Melindas.

Then there’s Will Ferrell, an eminently likable comedian who’s hamstrung as the Woody Allen surrogate, since Allen’s brand of one-liners runs in diametric opposition to his own goofy comic timing. He avoids the total embarrassment that was Kenneth Branagh’s impersonation in Celebrity; nevertheless, when ordinarily hilarious comedians like Ferrell and Steve Carell (in the Tony Roberts role) barely get a laugh in a story meant to embody "comedy," something’s wrong.

The tragedy fares better. Still, when the two tales conclude (and the comic version just stops), you may find yourself wondering what Allen’s answer to the comedy-or-tragedy question is. After 35 films, he’s still afraid of commitment.