(2004) Director/writer Woody Allen presents two versions of a young woman's turmoil after a divorce, one tragic and the other comic, alternating inventions of scenes incorporating similar elements by two playwrights (Neil Pepe and Wallace Shawn) to their audience of two friends in a restaurant.

It begins like this … At a dinner party in the home of Lee (Jonny Lee Miller), a sometimes actor and teacher of theater, and his wife Laurel (Chloe Sevigny), a music instructor, with their friends Cassie (Brooke Smith), who's pregnant, and her husband Peter, and another couple, Jack and Sally, unexpectedly arrives Melinda (Radha Mitchell), in need of alcohol and cigarettes, just off the bus from the Midwest. Laurel, Cassie, and Melinda had been a threesome in college. Apologizing for her intrusion, Melinda, looking disheveled and anxious, asks if she can spend some time with Laurel and Lee.

From an apartment down the hall, their neighbor Melinda appears at the door of Hobie (Will Ferrell in a role Allen certainly created with himself in mind were he a younger actor), an out-of-work actor, and his wife Susan (Amanda Peet), a film director, as they're entertaining company, in particular billionaire real-estate developer Steve Walsh (David Aaron Baker), whom Susan hopes will be willing to produce her movie; Melinda says she's just taken 28 sleeping pills and gets sick.

Melinda, whom Laurel and Lee had been expecting earlier in the summer, tells Laurel she tried to commit suicide and ended up in a strait jacket inside a state mental hospital. Further Melinda, who had been the wife of a doctor and mother of two children, confesses to having been "like Madam Bovary" in that out of boredom she began an affair with a photographer, John San Giuliano, who eventually dumped her, and the court has prohibited her from ever seeing her children again. "It only gets worse," she says.

Lee is against Melinda's remaining in their apartment for long, complaining of the lack of privacy. Cassie, however, suggests to Laurel a widower dentist, Bud Silverglide, as a possible match for Melinda. Meanwhile, arriving at the apartment unexpectedly again, Melinda accidentally interrupts Lee's assignation with a female student.

Steve has agreed to back Susan's film on the condition that the part of the psychiatrist, a role Hobie had been hoping to have, be given to someone with a recognizable name. Susan's friend Jennifer has in mind a wealthy dentist, Greg Earlinger (Josh Brolin), for Melinda, who majored in art history and works in a gallery; but Hobie and his friend Walt (Steve Carell) take Melinda along with them to the racetrack. She lets Hobie know that her physician husband had cheated on her with his secretary but that "sex is important to me," being passionate about someone's touching her.

At Cassie's party the high-strung Melinda quickly dismisses low-key Bud's offer of making a date and soon finds herself attracted to Ellis Moonsong (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the hired pianist from Harlem, who can't stop gushing about himself as a composer of serious music but who appears unfazed by any of Melinda's story of the troubles she brought upon herself. Laurel warns her: "You can't go through life rubbing lamps and wishing."

To his luxurious home in the Hamptons, Greg invites Hobie, Susan, and Melinda, to see his collection of big-game African trophies - Hobie asks, "Did you shoot all the furniture?" - and tries impressing everyone with himself. When Susan says, "I wish we could afford a place in the Hamptons. Everybody who's anybody has one," Hobie answers: "Yeah, but if you're somebody who's nobody, it's no fun to be around anybody who's everybody."

While Ellis and Melinda get better acquainted, Hobie develops a crush on Melinda but doesn't want to hurt Susan; but Laurel, the music teacher who plays piano, flirts with Ellis who can read her soul from hearing her music, while Lee, who's been canned from his job, takes out his frustrations on his wife; elsewhere Melinda, the art historian, can also play piano, and stops to tickle the ivories on the sidewalk where a piano is about to be hoisted into an upper-story apartment when Billy Wheeler (Daniel Sunjata) happens by to join her in a duet.

Desperate, despondent, and suicidal, Hobie becomes Melinda and Billy's project for female attention, fixing him up with former Playboy playmate Stacey (Vanessa Shaw), a Republican who says she's a radical in the bedroom, who reveals a story reminiscent of Melinda and Laurel.

"Laughter masks real terror about mortality," says the playwright of comedies.

Many of this film's elements have been recycled from Allen's Mighty Aphrodite and Bullets Over Broadway. Unfortunately, unlike those two earlier efforts, neither of the storylines here receives as satisfying a resolution.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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