Director: Woody Allen
Screenplay: Woody Allen
Starring: Radha Mitchell, Chloe Sevigny, Jonny Lee Miller, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Will Ferrell, Amanda Peet, Wallace Shawn
Running Time: 95 minutes
Genre: Comedy drama
In a Manhattan diner, four friends discuss whether life is essentially comic or tragic. To illustrate their points two playwrights take a simple premise (an emotionally fragile woman, Melinda (Mitchell), disrupts a dinner party) and tell their own versions of what happens to her. One version plays as a tragedy, and the other as a light romantic comedy.
It is an interesting premise, the problem is that the tone is very jarring throughout, most of the film is taken up with recounting Melinda's story interweaving the two versions moving from bleak drama to frothy comedy. Some of the film is pretty repetitive, we see the same events play out in two different versions. Radha Mitchell plays Melinda in both stories, with Chloe Sevigny, Jonny Lee Miller and Chiwetel Ejiofor starring in the tragic story, and Will Ferrell and Amanda Peet starring in the comedy version (which also features Steve Carell in a small role as Ferrell's friend). The performances are good for the most part, with Mitchell in particular giving a stunning performance in the central role, although Will Ferrell's performance seems to consist mainly of him doing a Woody Allen impression. The film feels very much like a filmed play at times, it has a fairly small cast of characters and is almost entirely dialogue driven, however the tragic storyline has muted colours and a slightly dull, slightly overcast look to it, while the comic sequences are bright, vibrant and sunlit.
While this is far from Woody Allen's best films, it still has it's moments.
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