Woody Allen isn’t funny anymore

Melinda and Melinda reviewed

by Junius

There was a time everybody went to a new Woody Allen film without hesitation. No longer. There have been too many disappointments.

Melinda and Melinda is, unfortunately, another. It almost makes it. It is sumptuously photographed by my friend Vilmos Zsigmond, and all the actors do good work. But almost isn’t good enough. A comedy of manners has a hard time of it these days when the world’s best mirror is the documentary. Of course, if it were hilariously funny, that would be different. But laughs are few and far between and we have to do with insight into social and sexual mores. Diminishing returns have set in since Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Besides, Melinda smokes. Can’t we expect a better way of indicating distress than by lighting up a cigarette? Melinda is constantly distressed and smokes a lot. I presume the production got money from tobacco interests. We all know product placement goes on. I saw it first hand when Vilmos Zsigmond invited me onto the set of Intersection for a scene being filmed in an old house on Davie Street. A producer was, in his usual loud way, boasting he had got Richard Gere wearing a certain make of wristwatch, even though it was an anachronism—the scene was a flashback to a time when that company make only tricycles and had not yet turned onto watches. No matter, the producer, looking along with the rest of us at the location video screen, saw with satisfaction that Gere played a snooker shot in such a way that the wristwatch showed.

This was not as bad a film as one that seemed to really need capital by the name of Homicide. Everybody smoked in that film. There was a Marlboro pack on the restaurant table between the two principles, who were puffing away inside. One scene took them to a library, and if the librarian didn’t light up while checking on some incunabula!

****