Allen’s deep wit returns in latest

It is faint praise to say that Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda” is the best movie he has made in five years.

Since “Sweet and Lowdown” in 1999, the Woody oeuvre has been expanded to include such weightless bagatelles as “Small Time Crooks,” “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” “Hollywood Ending” and “Anything Else” – perhaps the four worst comedies of his career.

But unlike those disposable larks, the flawed but ambitious “Melinda and Melinda” at least attempts some of the deeper themes that drove “Annie Hall,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Husbands and Wives,” and it has one of Allen’s patently inventive setups.

At a dinner table somewhere in Manhattan, two playwrights are debating the merits of comedy and tragedy when a third companion begins a story – a woman gets off a bus and interrupts a dinner party – and asks them whether it is comic or tragic.

Naturally, the playwrights see the story developing through contrasting perspectives, and from that spare setup, one tells the woman’s story as a tragedy and the other as a comedy.

Radha Mitchell plays the woman getting off a bus in both stories and arrives at a Manhattan dinner party with the same complicated past.

A one-time Park Avenue ingenue, Melinda had married a handsome doctor and moved to the Midwest, where, after catching him cheating on her, she began her own affair, ended up in a mental hospital, and is returning to New York under court order not to contact her two children.

Sounds like a tragedy to me, and the film’s chief flaw is that it’s not always apparent which story is being told.

The jaunty soundtrack music over the comedy helps, as does the recurring appearance of Will Ferrell, doing an ill-advised impression of the director’s stammering neurotic shtick.

Despite the different directions, the tones of the two stories seem deliberately similar, as if Allen wants to make the point – as an expert witness, we’ll concede – that life is simultaneously tragic and comic.

There are humorous moments in the tragic sequences, and sad ones in the comic. There are bad romances and good ones. But the sameness of them saps each story of a distinct identity.

But Allen still can write a good joke, and there are some here. Not enough to say he has returned to form, but enough to remind you of what that form was.