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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Imagine Neil Simon and Arthur Miller engaged in a mettlesome debate: Is life a comedy or a tragedy? Is our "deeper reality" a joke or a catastrophe? That's the idea behind Woody Allen's new movie, "Melinda and Melinda." At a restaurant in the Village, four friends are having dinner. Two of them are playwrights, one specializing in comedy (Wallace Shawn), the other in serious drama (Larry Pine). The atmosphere, warmed by wine and fellowship, is expansive, grandiloquent. One of the diners sets forth a proposal, and we see it as told: Melinda (Radha Mitchell), a distraught young woman, slender, blond, and travelling light, shows up unexpectedly at the apartment of married New York friends who are in the middle of giving a dinner party. We then see this premise as it's developed first by the tragic playwright and then by the comic one. In the tragic version, Melinda is an alcoholic, a pill-popper, and suicidal; she can't stop talking about herself, disrupts everything, and puts a strain on her two hosts, who are increasingly at odds. Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) is a onetime college hot shot getting nowhere as an actor in New York; his wife, Laurel (Chloe Sevigny), is a "Park Avenue princess" who teaches music part time between bouts of shopping. In the comic version, the hosts are again a couple coming unglued--Hobie (Will Ferrell), another failed New York...
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