What’s there to say about new Woody Allen films? Fans of the legend’s work already know what to expect when they walk into the theater: big laughs at lines that echo old Allen jokes and embarrasssed silence at the alarmingly frequent misfires. These days, Allen films are like comfort food, a reminder of a bygone (fake) world that sticks out like a Victrola in a barrel of iPods.

“Melinda and Melinda” is no different, marshalling a spectacular cast and relying on the actors’ obvious delight in entering the Allen canon. This is their chance, and they’re going to make the most of it. Watching gifted actors like Will Ferrell, Radha Mitchell, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Amanda Peet give these characters a spirited go is like watching a gaggle of tourists mugging for a picture in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

At least “Melinda and Melinda” feels like a Woody Allen film of old, if a pale version of one. The story moves between two different narratives, each involving the same basic situation but playing out differently until—who’d have thunk it?—thematic parallels form between them. Turns out comedy is not always a funny proposition, nor tragedy a dour one.

Given the fact that almost every work of art in the last 100 years or so has blurred the lines between tragedy and comedy, Allen’s conceit might seem a little old. Not just “old”, really; in artistic terms this “old” means something like “Pre-Cambrian”. But this didn’t upset me. Allen’s enduring value is that he is one of the ever-shrinking number of artists who bother trying to answer a question that was never really closed to begin with. I consider this a blessing in an age when our best directors are content with paying tribute to grindhouse trash (Quentin Tarantino) or grade-school pop-up books (Wes Anderson).

If anything frustrates me about Allen’s whimsical foray into such a thorny problem it’s that he’s done it before and done it better. “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Hannah And Her Sisters” are two of the more obvious examples of the central Allen structure, a single film containing at least two major plotlines, one serious, the other comic. In fact, Allen’s conceit is entirely contained in most of his jokes, notably the “And such small portions!” joke in “Annie Hall”. Explicitly asking the question as he does here is rather baffling. What was he doing all along, if not exploring the artificial constructions drama places on the chaos of life?

And posing the question through the mouths of four featureless Manhattan diners muddles the film’s bipolar structure. The tales of the two Melindas seem too much like an empty exercise over coffee and dessert; tragic Melinda’s end is so abrupt you half expect to hear a voiceover of Wallace Shawn saying “Check, please”! I’d have been more interested in a symposium attempting to ascertain, by way of trigonometry and witchcraft, the exact dimensions of Peet’s enormous choppers.

A big part of the problem is Melinda’s contrasting appearances. In the tragic segments, Melinda is almost a figure out of Greek drama, an avenging fury clinging to a twelve-step program whose unhappiness seems fated in the stars. She’s vividly drawn. But in the comic segments, she is merely a wallflower in a slight amusement. In effect, it’s the difference between a lead and a bit player. They Melindas don’t seem like the same woman, so what can we really learn about the different circumstances attached to their lives?

The unfortunate Melinda is a doomed woman vividly drawn, but the more we detour to her comic counterpart, the more her tragic essence is siphoned off. Her comic part would have been better played by Peet (an actress with a tragic fate of her own, namely that she always seems tenfold smarter than the women she plays). Completing Mitchell’s marginalization, Ferrell simply owns the comic portions. When he’s onscreen, the eyes don’t stray from him long enough to register anyone else.

As with Jason Biggs in last year’s “Anything Else”, casting Ferrell was an attempt to modernize the nebbish Allen surrogate, and like Biggs he succeeds often enough to forgive his mistakes. No matter how classic putdowns like “He should be inflated with an air hose” are delivered, Ferrell just doesn’t suit Allen’s writing. Watching him is amusing only to spot the familiar Allen tics, but as comic punches they hit like feathers.

A key difference is physical. Part of Allen’s appeal is his diminutive stature. He cuts a winning figure because the size of his wit is inversely proportionate to the size of his biceps. Ferrell looks too healthy for the role. He comes to seem cramped, constipated. The energy is all wrong. The lines are for a man who gets by on his wit, but Ferrell looks like he could rip a man’s head off and yawn doing it. Casting Ferrell as an Allen surrogate is like putting Chewbacca in the role of “Lassie”. Nice to see Ferrell given some smart lines for once—he really is a gifted comedian—but he won’t hit his stride as an actor until he can speak intelligently while knocking around the set like a clumsy grizzly.

All this talk of Allen’s “surrogates” highlights just how impossible his situation is. As A. O. Scott in The New York Times recently noted, Allen’s audience is far too cozy with the filmmaker and his movies to give him the leeway he needs. He can’t move on because we can’t move on. The sets, costumes, characters, plots—an Allen film, at this stage of his career, is only for the diehards. The director himself talks comfortably about his “built-in” audience. There’s a reciprocity that has all but killed every film Allen has released since the early Nineties. The only movie Allen has made since “Bullets Over Broadway” that deserves mention among the best he’s released is “Sweet And Lowdown”. That film was recognizably an Allen film, and yet, with Sean Penn and Samantha Morton breaking free of the usual Allen stereotypes, he escaped the burden of his own filmography. Allen wants to achieve that in “Melinda and Melinda” but doesn’t know how to get off his own assembly line (This Year’s Woody Allen Project). Let’s hope he figures it out.