|
I was pretty sure that the stultified paralysis of Anything Else would eventually cause me to do myself serious injury and felt fortunate that when the lights came up, most of the intensity of my dislike for the Woody Allen of the last several years dissipated like the details of a bad dream. It's possible to leave the diminutive auteur in the dark, it seems, and such is the fate, too (and not a bad critique), of the more palatable but no less appallingly reductive and juvenile Melinda and Melinda. It's metaphysics by way of Strindberg, of course, and only as good as Allen ever is at capering around his familiar autumnal Manhattan fantasias in his "serious filmmaker" cap. His milieu, his Yoknapatawpha County, has always been the mating rituals of "blocked" artists--often filmmakers casting or directing films within films (What's Up, Tiger Lily?, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hollywood Ending)--orbiting around one another in impotent, inevitably mortal, orbits. If he doesn't star in them himself, he hires someone to impersonate him--the Woodman is never far from his own lover/hand, and his casts of invariably grateful manqué dutifully take on his cadences and exhortations to debate Bartók and Bergman in airless dinner parties that would drive even Buñuel nuts.
Melinda and Melinda begins at a dinner where two playwrights (Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine) argue about the essence of man boiling down to those comedy and tragedy masks that theatre majors hang ceramic versions of in their dorm rooms (to the right of that Robert Doisneau photo of French people kissing and above a framed playbill from their high school production of "Hello Dolly"). Take death masks of Shawn and Pine and they'd be scary approximations of that same dramaturgical polarity--and a death mask is a pretty fair comment on Allen's last five films or so: recognizably him yet a pallid imitation, leeched of vitality and inspiration and incapable of new expressions. So Melinda and Melinda vacillates between Allen's sad, antiquated attempts at comedy of late and Allen's always-sad, hamstrung attempts at Ibsen by way of Fellini/Chekhov by way of Bergman, in telling a story with similar elements twice: once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, with only the soundtrack to distinguish the two. It's serious if it's Stravinsky, it's funny if it's Duke Ellington, though I'd offer that the opposite often holds true. The literati would wag their shaggy heads at me and tell me that this is exactly the point yogi Woody is trying to make, that the line between tragedy and comedy is the difference, as Mel Brooks once defined, between cutting his own finger and you falling into an open manhole and dying, i.e. not so different after all.
But that doesn't mean Allen hasn't lost the ability to make a funny movie (even with Will Ferrell playing Allen), nor does it mean that his tragi-dramas have gotten any less suffocatingly formalist. Think of him as another George Lucas, sitting on past success and suckling off a shrinking, but fervent, flock of mindless sheep, having not popped his head out a window in the last twenty years or had anything like a check to balance his missteps; he's still of the mind that references to Nuremberg and the wreck of the Hesperus mark a character as the height of au courant intellectual hipsterism instead of a kitsch parody of the same. (Was a time he knew the difference.) Consider a scene where (in the "tragic" story--but, again, who can tell?) the adulterous husband (Jonny Lee Miller) of poor neglected music teacher Laurel (Chloë Sevigny, luminous) encourages his young lover to read the Desdemona part in "Othello", and then consider what Allen asks of Mitchell in her "cuckoo" scene with her own black boyfriend Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
A younger Woody Allen would have mined the parallel for irony--this Woody Allen tries to turn it into an existential statement on sex and gender. When the "dark" Melinda (both Melindas are played by Radha Mitchell, trying to pull off a fabulist schizoid tour-de-force like countrywoman Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive) drops bombs like her murder of an ex-lover and the suicide of her mother, they come off as every bit as hilariously ill-timed as one of Ferrell's desperate, castrated cries about burning dinner (his character's wife (Amanda Peet, natch), is working on a film (double natch) called "The Castration Sonata"). Allen's tragedy today revolves around the slapstick of falling into open manholes, and his comedies are the stuff of papercuts. It's become sport to identify which of the actors in Allen's casts transcends the material enough to leave an individual impression--sort of a sad state of affairs when what was once the most vibrant satirical force in American film is now a black hole that only a lucky few can escape.-Walter Chaw
|
dvd reviews: