Woody Allen throws his two cents into the alternative-reality forum. Two playwrights, one tragic and the other comic, are sitting in a New York bistro arguing their respective Weltanschauungs, when a tablemate proposes to tell a true story, and let the playwrights decide whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. We ourselves don't hear the story, beyond the first step of a woman arriving unannounced at an apartment door during a dinner party. Dissolve to the end of the story, and each playwright now gets to put his own spin on it, taking turns reeling out the plotline. The two tales are enacted by completely separate casts, excepting Radha Mitchell, the alternative Melindas. Like most of Allen's films, even at his lowest ebb, this one has a clear point of inspiration, an idea, a concept, a conceit. But it's a little more of a challenge than usual, a hard job with no easy solution, and what's certain is that Allen wasn't up to it: an empty structure waiting to be furnished. Though there are, for sure, some clever permutations of shared elements (the single-malt Scotch, the magic lamp, the eligible dentist), the two stories seem insufficiently differentiated, even down to their smothering buttery light: the tragic insufficiently intense, the comic insufficiently funny. It is sometimes, as we switch back and forth, hard to remember which is which; and ultimately hard to imagine, as the plotlines diverge, what the "true" story could originally have been. The whole thing feels a bit monotonous, and yet -- the strength of the structure -- we keep hanging on to see where it's headed. Mitchell, in what might have been a virtuoso role for a Meryl Streep or a Judy Davis, is herself insufficiently differentiated: kinkier hair and more cigarettes for tragedy. Put more harshly, she reveals not much range and not much personality. With Will Ferrell, Amanda Peet, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Sevigny, Brooke Smith, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and no Allen. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd