Melinda and Melinda

Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, which opened in a single theater in New York to big business last weekend, is opening in another 17 theaters tonight (Wednesday) and in 66 more on Friday. How wide it will eventually open presumably depends a great deal on how it fares in its limited release. It is faring only so-so with critics. The film -- two takes, one funny and one tragic, on an anecdote about a woman named Melinda -- certainly is generating a lot of sophisticated appraisal. A. O. Scott in the New York Times writes that as Allen interweaves the two versions, it becomes apparent that his notions of comedy and tragedy do not quite correspond either to scholarly dogma or to everyday usage. You might, for instance, expect the tragic tale to purge your unruly emotions through pity and terror, rather than through bafflement and ennui. You might also expect the comic half of the movie to be funny, in which case the joke is on you. It's hard to tell whether Scott liked the movie or not. Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal seems to like it -- sort of, writing: The movie itself wears thin from time to time, and the lightly parodic dialogue sometimes borders on prosaic. But Melinda and Melinda is full of entertaining vignettes that eventually make a happy mockery, as they're meant to do, of the tragedy vs. comedy dialectic. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times seems to like it more, calling it a movie about the symbiosis of the filmmaker and the audience, who are required to conspire in the creation of an imaginary world. He shows us how he does it and how we do it. In its complexity and wit, this is one of his best recent films. Similarly, Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune concludes that the film has exactly what we want in a Woody Allen movie: wit, eloquence, irreverence, New York, jazz/classical on the soundtrack music, a glittering all-star ensemble. ... And Allen's writing is as good and sharp as anything he has done recently. But Geoff Pevere in the Toronto Star turns those observations into the faintest of praise: Viewed with a generosity of spirit even the most ardent admirer must now struggle to muster, you could call Woody Allen's new movie his most ambitious in years, he writes. Pevere, like many other critics, suggests that Allen hasn't really made an ambitious film in years. Indeed, virtually all of the reviewers compare Melinda and Melinda with other Allen films, most of them placing it about in the middle between his best and worst, although Stephen Hunter writes in the Washington Post: It's hard to place the film in the Allen canon because so much of his recent work is so unmemorable. This one included, he suggests.