By Steven Rosen

Like an answered prayer, "Melinda and Melinda" finds Woody Allen coming through his most fallow period creatively - the curdled, anemic genre spoofs made for DreamWorks SKG - with his storytelling talent and directorial skills with actors intact.

If this Fox Searchlight release is not among his best works - not in the Top Ten, in my opinion - the difference between it and "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" or "Small Time Crooks" is like night and day. Allen is back observing the world of characters that live and breathe the New York skyline in all its sophisticated, articulate, messy, neurotically artistic glory. And he makes them compelling.

They inhabit the same world Allen does - or so he makes us think, just as he used to in films like "Annie Hall," "Manhattan," and "Husbands and Wives." And although the 69-year-old director-writer doesn't appear in this film (for the first time since 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown"), he's found an actor who does a pretty good job of taking his traditional role - sweet, nebbishy, introspective, exasperated: Will Ferrell.

That's right, from "Elf" to Woody - a natural progression, more or less.

Actually, Allen started to show a return to form with 2003's "Anything Else." Sometimes scathingly funny in its story of a young New York writer torn between career and a doomed relationship, it ultimately failed to make that relationship believable. Allen the writer-director seemed on the outside looking in. But in a meaty supporting role as the writer's aging mentor, a schoolteacher, Allen pushed his neurosis shtick into wild, aggressive paranoia that showed creative daring.

Bizarrely, DreamWorks marketed the film as a youth-oriented romantic comedy - starring Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci - rather than a film by one of our greatest living directors. It was a new low in movie marketing and nobody went. Allen must be glad to be rid of that company!

"Melinda and Melinda" tones down the one-liners in order to improve the believability of its characters' relationships. It's rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but then again it's only supposed to be a half-comedy. The premise is that two Manhattan couples - including a successful dramatist (Wallace Shawn) and a humorist playwright (Larry Pine) - get into a dinner conversation about the essence of life. Comic or tragic? Or are the two merely flip sides of the same flop single?

"The essence of life isn't comic, it's tragic," the dramatist says. "It's exactly because of the tragedy, the pain of life, that people run to my comedies," the humorist counters. Allen's delineation of the theme - not just of this film, but his entire oeuvre - has rarely been so overtly stated. But the scene plays with wit and grace.

Structurally similar to "Broadway Danny Rose," the movie then veers in and out of separate dramatizations of these two men's stories, both of which are about a confused young woman named Melinda. Rhada Mitchell plays her in both stories - thus, she is "Melinda and Melinda." But she is surrounded with an ensemble of promising young actors and, of course, one superstar.

In the "tragedy," she shows up unannounced at the door of some college friends - haughty, struggling actor Lee (Jonny Lee Miller) and his sophisticated, ladies-who-lunch-type wife Laurel (Chlo렓evigny) - as they entertain for dinner.

Bedraggled and remorseful over a failed marriage, chain-smoking as if tomorrow was just a waste of time, she stays with them trying to recover. Slowly, she begins to find romance anew with a Harlem-raised piano player who writes operas ("Dirty Pretty Things'" Chiwetel Ejiofor). But, remember, tragedies aren't supposed to end well.

In the "comedy," she's slightly perkier and lives in the same apartment building as struggling but delicately polite actor Hobie (Ferrell) and his assertive independent-filmmaker wife Susan (Amanda Peet). She interrupts their dinner entertaining - Hobie has made Chilean sea bass lightly dusted with lime - to seek help from a sleeping-pill overdose.

He soon becomes fascinated with her, which he tries to hide from Susan until discovering that she's sleeping around. His happiness at catching her in the act - realizing he's set free - is a delightfully light scene from a director who previously has chronicled relationship angst in terrifying ways, a la "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Husbands and Wives." As such, it's the film's best comic moment.

Ferrell is so likeable an actor that his punch lines almost seem like something Hobie would really say, rather than something Allen wrote for a character he would have played were he younger. But there's no way he can deliver something like "I dream of myself kissing Melinda and I'm immediately on trial at Nuremberg" and be anything but a stand-in for the auteur behind the camera. (I find it hard to believe anyone under 50 would even use a "Nuremberg" reference these days, unless he'd just seen "The Producers" on stage.)

But, really, "Melinda and Melinda" is about two actresses - Mitchell and Sevigny. The former has been striking in several sophisticated films, including "High Art" and "Finding Neverland." In Lisa Cholodenko's "High Art," she was remarkable - timid yet courageous in discovering her sexuality while also making sense of an exciting, dangerous world of New York's drugged-out, art-rebel, romantic losers.

One can imagine Allen watching "High Art" and being amazed at - maybe even jealous of - a Bohemian side of the Big Apple he was too old and too high-cultured to know. But Mitchell responds well to being placed in Allen's more polite, if just as cruel, New York social world - Central Park walks, references to Bartok and Nabokov, cozy bistros, racetrack visits, and catered parties.

Her two Melindas are different enough to keep the film's intercut parallel narratives separate, but alike enough in their fragility to let the story's construction feel organic and naturalistic rather than a stunt.

But also standing out is Sevigny, whose portrayal of a gloomily down-to-earth young blueblood - patrolling Manhattan like she inherited it (but doesn't want it) in her pink blazer and white blouse - is equally potent. She carries it all with powerful dignity and seriousness, even when her character betrays Melinda's friendship. Allen apparently liked her in Whit Stillman's "The Lastays of Disco," a somewhat similar role, but in general this shows another side to an actress sometimes thought of, after "Kids," "Boys Don't Cry" and "The Brown Bunny" as, well, weird.

Production values are, too, very high with Vilmos Zsigmond handling cinematography and a soundtrack featuring standards performed by Dick Hyman and classical selections from Bartok and Bach.

Finally, "Melinda and Melinda" does raise the issue of whether life is comic or tragic. In a way, the answer is obvious right from the movie's beginning - it's both, because death can't be avoided. That's why we have irony, and the "tragedy" here ends on an ironic note far closer to black comedy. It has a lasting impact. Thank God Allen is regaining his touch.

(This originally appeared on ReallyGoodFilms.com)