It has been quite sometime since I've seen a decent Woody Allen film - 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown" to be exact - and in the interim I've been less-than-eager to attend one of his new films in light of my expectations only to be trampled when the film's mediocrity is all but in bold letters so it was with trepidation that I finally succumbed to the Wood-man's siren call to witness his latest - which I'm happy to report wasn't a total waste but still needs improvement for his next vehicle.

The premise is simple - two pontificating playwrights, one a comedic writer the latter a tragedarian (Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine respectively) - discuss over an intimate dinner on a rainy night in Manhattan whether a certain idea is prime for a comedy or in fact a drama - a young mysterious woman arrives unannounced to a dinner party in progress - with the results decidedly as schizophrenic as the game at hand.

The character - Melinda (played winningly by Radha Mitchell in a tour de force turn) - in the comedy is a somewhat scatterbrain who interrupts a dinner being given by Hobie and Susan (Will Ferrell in the Allen surrogate role and the underused Amanda Peet), a married couple, who announces she's taken 28 sleeping pills. The couple and her guest make Melinda comfortable and eventually learn about her woes involving a sad affair of the heart and a seemingly listless path of living.

Melinda in the dramatic piece is an old friend of Laurel (Chloe Sevigny), a college chum and her alcoholic husband Lee (miscast Jonny Lee Miller), an actor whose dinner party is an attempt to get him cast in a producer's new play. Melinda divulges a shady marriage gone wrong to her frequent unbalanced mental state and some criminal activity that has her custody fight for her children in dire jeopardy. With no place to stay Laurel insists Melinda remain with them until she can get back on her feet.

Both storylines ping-pong back and forth with a rather random inconsistency where Allen at first tries to mirror the parallel tales but ultimately one seems heavy-handed more than the other and Melinda as a duo fictional character, like the film in general, is a work in progress with a varied sketchy existence.

That may be the point overall yet the two do no mix well in spite of Mitchell's very good performances balancing out the randomness of it all without missing a beat (the way to remember which one she is by her hair-dos, straight for comedy and wavy for drama) while the only other cast member worth mentioning is Ferrell who has some fine comic moments involving both physical (getting his bathrobe caught in a door) and a funny dream sequence fantasizing what would happen if in fact Melinda was in love with his worshipping from afar Hobie.  

Allen wisely stays out of the picture yet he seems out of sorts again (does anyone still write to the 'personals'? Apparently the Internet is still out of touch for Woody) in his New York; wish he'd get back to us the way he did in his heyday.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)