Melinda and Melinda

It's a Woody Allen, so as with any Woody Allen, it's full of complexity, gut honesty and wit.

It starts with a dinner table discussion between four friends, two of them playwrights, with the entire movie taking off as an imaginary discussion with the typical articulate, intellectual abstractions of Allen. 

One of playwrights believes that a story, to reflect real life, has to be a tragedy and the other believes in needs to be comedy, with a moderator giving a connotation of nothing in life being a definitive tragedy or comedy. The fourth guy narrates a story, which then flows as imagination into parallel stories of a Melinda gate crashing into a dinner party. And the movie is the story of each of those Melindas.

                           

While one was expected to have tragedy and the other the comic element, each seems to cut through both. In both cases Melinda stirs up or rather lets surface marital instabilities and causes upheavals in her friends lives, most of them finding what they want through building other relationships. 

It was super cute when Hobie ( Will Farell) rubs an old Alladin Lamp in a antic shop and he's like trying to articulate his wish and comes up with...I want Melinda, and I want my wife to not get hurt. And it happens that he finds his wife in bed with her producer (she's a director) and he's so thrilled when he comes upon them, that he can't hide his joy. 

The stories themselves are sketchy because there's so many of them, like multiple short stories within a movie, and it's hard to attach oneself to any one character, or feel for any of them. In the comedy Melinda finds love, in the tragedy she's caught on the wrong end of a triangle.

Not a strong recommendation, but if you're a Woody Allen fan, it serves up his usual recipe of witty and hostile one liners.