The Adventures of Peet & Peet

Melinda and Melinda (2005)
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a Woody Allen film, starring Will Ferrell and Radha Mitchell. Written by Allen. 100 m. PG-13 for adult situations involving sexuality, and some substance material.

3.5/5

A Lot Like Love (2005)
Buena Vista Pictures presents a Nigel Cole film, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet. Written by Colin Patrick Lynch. 107m. PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and language.

1/5

She’s deeply astute, multi-faceted, sometimes ferociously independent. Or, she’s obtuse, oftentimes ditzy to a fault, and all sex appeal with little else offered.

Will the real Amanda Peet please stand up?

At 33, Peet has launched a career trajectory that isn’t exactly uncommon. She parlays big-budget efforts in order to do
serious, small endeavors. At least that’s how we think that it unfolds, just as we assume Peet is actually quite adept at playing dumb, but is not actually without brains.

Woody Allen’s longtime casting director Juliet Taylor must have made similar assumptions. Peet is given a chunky supporting role in “Melinda and Melinda,” a true dramedy in which Peet is an ambitious filmmaker married to unemployed actor Hobie (Will Ferrell) in the film’s comedic segment.

The film’s setting is actually an extended conversation between two playwrights over dinner, both who see a friend’s true-life story of adultery as the basis for their own type of productions. It is Sy (Wallace Shawn, whose inclusion at any dinner table is a charming homage) who sees the humorous elements of the story. He invents Melinda (Radha Mitchell) as a next-door neighbor who attracts Hobie’s fancy, despite her seemingly troubled existence. Trying to be coy with his longing, Hobie exhibits all of the obsequious mannerisms instead.

Hobie is too spineless to suggest trial separation and, besides, the playwright’s hand won’t allow it. Instead, Sy invents a confrontation of side-splitting proportions: the actor is relieved to see his wife diddling her producer in their upscale apartment because it gives him license to fawn over Melinda publicly.

Sy’s dinner companion, Max (Larry Pine), sees the situation completely differently. The comedy of the situation, he argues, only merits an inevitable tragedy. In his world, Melinda (again, Mitchell) visits her school chum, Laurel (Chloë Sevigny), during a transition period in the young friend’s life. Laurel is on the outs with her self-consumed actor husband Lee (Jonny Lee Miller), who has found comfort at the bottom of a bottle of booze.

Laurel’s attempts to align Melinda with Mr. Right are complicated by her friend’s tragic compulsion; Melinda’s choice of opera composer Ellis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is secretly coveted by her college confidant.

Some may find Allen’s dueling plots in “Melinda” to be an overt sign of indecision. I disagree strongly. While many abandoned him after “Manhattan” only to rejoin him when he made something which had a far-reaching appeal (like “Hannah and Her Sisters”), Allen has consistently executed one well-made film a year. His writing for his female leads is still amongst the very best today; it’s also not hard to admire that he’s made films that he fancies, and not some target demographic.

“Melinda” is a celebration of the pregnant idea, which has infinite potential until the screenwriter is forced to make a decision and outline its intended path. Mostly, it’s an acknowledgment that stories can be anything we want them to be, especially when we’re in the cineplex. Much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, audiences are chained to their seats while the flickering light behind us projects images. Implicit in the arrangement is a concession by the audience: We are asked to believe the images are reality for 100 minutes, until our “enslavement” is ended. Our bonds are only broken when the director wields his will, and the ending of “Melinda” is a big wink to that ideology.

Naturally, we could break our own chains by simply exiting the theater, which might be a good idea if you bought seats to “A Lot Like Love.”

Here Peet is outfitted in a much less tasteful persona, a groupie who takes a dithering college graduate (Ashton Kutcher) on a brief sexual odyssey in an airplane bathroom.

From there, it’s some kind of puppy love between Oliver and his seductress Emily. That’s the only way to explain the friendship which inexplicably evolves out of this 10-minute fling.

In a plot twist that owes a debt of thanks to “Before Sunset,” the pair walk along the streets of New York City, discussing unessential elements of life. Oliver broaches a bet: Emily should phone him in six years to see how his life goals have unfolded.

But Emily’s despondency over a breakup leads her to contact Oliver just three years later for a New Year’s Eve date. It’s a convenient to the plot, which will eventually turn into hell’s version of “Groundhog Day,” wherein the two main characters are doomed to engage in the same, stupid “meet cute” every year or so.

The story certainly trails Oliver and Emily before, during, and after professional and personal highs and lows, but I became fidgety over its lack of any sort of decisiveness. It sort of became what everyone thought “Melinda” would be: an opus of meandering that really makes no formal declaration of anything significant.

By the time Oliver and Emily align their feelings and profess their true love seven years after their initial hookup, the audience will be paralyzed into a yawn-inducing stupor. Not only is the conclusion a forgone contrivance, but it’s a good 90 minutes late.

It’s no relief that both Kutcher and Peet’s characters lack any dimensionality that would allow this film’s audience to care about their eventual union. “A Lot Like Love” not only forgot to outfit its central protagonists with brains, it most assuredly left its good ideas on the drafting table.