Four people sit in a restaurant chatting over cocktails and soon two of them come up with a story, two stories, actually, about the same fictional person.

Such is the premise for Melinda and Melinda, the most recent entry from legendary writer-director Woody Allen. As it turns out, one of the yarnspinners sees the tale of Melinda, a scotch-swilling, sometimes-suicidal free spirit as the tragic one and the other as the backdrop for comedy.

With this and Allen's last movie, 2003's microwaved comedy Anything Else, the director has dwelled rather obsessively on discerning the meaning of life. Of course Allen, an intellectual, has always layered his scripts with philosophical subtext, but the difference is that he used to be counted on to bring the funny.

The funny is conspicuously lacking in Melinda and Melinda, which is a huge problem considering how thoroughly concerned the film is with the idea of comedy as a theme. As Hobie, a typically neurotic Allen surrogate with a crush on Melinda in the "comic" story, Will Ferrell fires out a fusillade of Allen-esque one-liners in the hopes that a few of them might stick. Ferrell has Allen's sarcastic, self-effacing delivery down perfectly, but his epigrams tend to inspire nervous, obsequious smiles much more often than hearty laughs.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Steve Carell show up as Hobie's dentist buddy, only to be thoroughly disappointed when his character turned out to be nothing more than a sounding board for Hobie to help advance the plot. Even a talented comedian like Carell couldn't find the funny in the half-baked comedy script.

Conversely, the dramatic story line is a testament to Allen's penchant for writing dynamic characters. There are about a handful of them that are so intricately woven and sincerely acted that they become real people who transcend the story space of the film and, we imagine, live on after the film has ended.

That the drama is so engaging relative to the consistently flat note struck by the comedy makes the devotee inside of me suspect Allen is up to something here.

Perhaps by rendering the characters in the comedy superficial and contriving its story with a sunny myopia, Allen is commenting on the artificiality of comedy as an overall genre.

The relative richness of character in the drama, meanwhile, is intentionally dampened somewhat by its pessimistic, anti-theological distance.

One of the characters later draws a connection between storyteller and worldview, and I think this is Allen's point: some audiences like stories to fit neatly into a classical (if contrived) structure and some audiences prefer stories that delve so deeply into characters that the story becomes confusing and the meaning ambivalent.

What you like equals how you see the world. A cool concept, but not yet a good movie, because Allen merely grazes the surface of the artistic potential this concept generates.

He could have, for instance, tweaked his visual style in opposite directions according to genre, making the comedy basic and bright and painting the drama in the starkly realistic tones of an art film.

I'm not suggesting that he was required to go in this or that direction, just that I wish Allen had gone in some direction, that he had done some cinematic experimentation like he used to in the good old Stardust Memories days.

It's as if he is not interested as much in the surface level of his films anymore.

Allen's recent efforts exist less as works of art than as vehicles for his existential theses. I value the unique voice the director brings to each film as well as the polished professionalism of each one of his scripts, but I can't help but wonder how much better they could be if he spent more effort cultivating the outer donut of his films and less effort stuffing them with a creamy philosophical filling.