The movie is two stories -- one a tragedy, the other a comedy -- about one woman named, of course, Melinda (Radha Mitchell). Things begin when two downtown dinner companions, playwrights played by Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine, argue whether comedy or tragedy is more relevant to the human condition. The movie enacts both writers' proposals.
In the tragic half, Melinda reappears in New York after years away, crashing the small dinner party of an old friend, a spoiled Park Avenue princess named Laurel (Chloe Sevigny) and her vaguely successful actor husband, Lee (Jonny Lee Miller). Melinda is thin, beautiful, depressive, and apparently suicidal, hijacking the evening with the sad story of her life, which is capped with a recent discharge from a mental facility. She was an art historian who married a doctor and moved to the Midwest only to become miserable as a wife and mother, just like, we're reminded, Emma Bovary.
In the comic half, Melinda, having taken a near-fatal dose of pills, interrupts a larger party presided over by her new neighbors, Susan (Amanda Peet) an up-and-coming filmmaker whose latest film is called ''The Castration Sonata," and Susan's husband, Hobie (Will Ferrell), is a struggling actor.
Melinda's two halves are first told separately and awkwardly, then rather seamlessly. At first, the fluidity seems to be Allen's conscious comment that there is sadness in comedy and comedy in sadness. But this runs counter to the dueling philosophies that Shawn and Pine argue so casually, not to mention pretentiously, throughout. That it becomes hard to tell which half is which just means there has been a glaring mix-up. The comedy is sadly unfunny, and the tragedy, as such, is often humorously sad.
