Defending Woody

As New York Times film critic A.O. Scott noted recently,The yearly Woody Allen release has become a reliably anti-climactic American cinematic event. Once considered a great film auteur, Allen has, over the last 10 years, come to be thought of as an ex-genius who has lost his touch. His most unwavering admirers (an endangered species) await his films with bated breath, hoping they'll be solid enough to maintain his precarious status as a nonetheless important American filmmaker; his harshest critics unfailingly trash each of his pictures as further evidence of a stale artistic sensibility increasingly alienated from our cultural moment. Some suggest that Allen abandon his rigorous one-film-a-year work ethic and try to make the next one count; others go as far as to wish that he stop making movies altogether, since he has nothing left to say.

This collective disdain has been perhaps the most unjustified condemnation of a still vitally talented film genius that America has seen in recent years. While Allen's films over the past decade don't measure up to his masterpieces – they lack the nonstop laughs of Sleeper (1973), the bittersweet zing of Annie Hall (1977), the romantic vision of Manhattan (1979), the novelistic complexity of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), or the dark philosophical pull of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) – they are still a remarkably diverse and inventive bunch of movies, varying slightly in quality, but all exuberant and tricky in their own way. In a just world, Woody Allen's recent body of work would enable him to guard his title as one of the consistently best American directors. But for various reasons, not all of them necessarily related to the films themselves, Allen is widely regarded as having fallen from creative grace.

His new film, Melinda and Melinda, which opens Friday in select cities, alternates tragic and comic versions of the same story: A troubled young woman inadvertently wreaks emotional havoc on the lives of those around her. The film has generated buzz as Allen's most substantial work in years. As is often the case, the advance word is misleading: Melinda and Melinda is in fact just as light as most of Allen's latest fare, and sometimes disappointingly flat; as is always the case with Allen's films, it's still far more interesting than the majority of American movies. Allen takes off from a rather thin narrative gimmick: debating whether life is essentially comic or tragic, two writers take turns spinning a tale about the alluring but unstable Melinda, each in his fashion. In the tragic take, a chain-smoking, pill-popping Melinda (Radha Mitchell) tries to escape a tumultuous past and ends up a catalyst for romantic chaos revolving around a charming pianist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and the deteriorating marriage of her childhood friend Laurel (Chlo� Sevigny) to an alcoholic actor (Jonny Lee Miller). In the comic take, an innocuously frazzled Melinda becomes the object of desire for Hobie (Will Ferrell), a bumbling out-of-work actor married to a self-absorbed director (Amanda Peet).

Much of the film is graceful and absorbing, and Mitchell is compelling – by turns ravaged and charming – in her dual roles. Yet there's an occasional sense of slackness and inconsequentiality about it all. The tragic version has several lovely moments, many of which can be attributed to Sevigny's marvelously delicate portrayal of a rich girl realizing the price of the conventional life she's chosen. What's missing is a sense of danger, a sense that there's something truly at stake in the characters' crises. Part of the problem is that Melinda's stormy history is so trite and unconvincing that a climactic betrayal which threatens her newfound happiness doesn't sting the way it should. The comic version is warm and engaging, but its Melinda is rather blandly conceived, and apart from a few sequences – particularly a disastrous day trip to the Hamptons with a studly dentist – the laughs just aren't frequent enough. Allen's implication that the distinction between comedy and tragedy is blurry – that comedy is laced with sadness and tragedy contains elements of the ridiculous – is haunting, but one can't help wishing that his tragic version was slightly darker and his comic version slightly wittier.