First, it must be said: Medicine for Melancholy is the worst
title for a film in recent memory, especially since it has no direct
relation to the plot or the characters. It’s a shame that such an
appealing, sincere movie has a name that sounds like a poorly
translated French film. But brave viewers who push past the melodrama
on the marquee will be rewarded with a thoughtful, adult movie about
urban life in the early 21st century.
After a drunken hookup, Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Joanne (Tracey
Heggins) spend a lazy Sunday traveling around San Francisco by cab,
bike, and foot, getting to know each other. Medicine is almost a
black-and-white film—nearly every frame has had the color leached
from it, the way the world looks on a hungover morning. It’s fitting
that the dialogue is almost entirely, in one way or another, about
color: Micah is a fledgling Angry Young Black Man, but also a
beanie-wearing hipster doofus. Joanne is dating a white guy and thinks
of herself as an arty film nerd who happens to be black.
Cenac’s laid-back stoner delivery and Heggins’s pixie cuteness
effectively camouflage the film’s intentions. They have a genuine
chemistry, and it is to their credit that Medicine works as a
high-minded date movie. It’s to director Barry Jenkins’s credit that his first movie
also functions as a kind of documentary of race and gentrification in
San Francisco right now. Micah is the kind of privileged young urban
black man who can seduce a girl by singing a goofy version of the
Mr. Rogers theme song and then drop into a rant about how just 7
percent of his city is black without realizing that his own
relationship to race is a complicated thing.
Medicine stumbles only once, when it literally stops
everything for a lecture. Near the end of the film, just as the
characters are reaching a significant point in their relationship, they
stop and gawk into a storefront where a discussion on gentrification
takes place, and the next five minutes of the movie consists of
real-life housing activists trying not to look into the camera as they
discuss how rent control is about to go extinct in San Francisco. A
more practiced director/screenwriter than Jenkins would be able to
deftly fold the pertinent information into the dialogue, but this
interlude makes Medicine feel like a very good first date that
gets interrupted by a short, unexciting business call. 
Paul I don’t know why you would start a review with such a un-noteworthy objection, especially when you seem to like the film as much as you do. Your goal as a reviewer should be to either encourage or discourage people from seeing a film, not pat yourself on the back with such non-sense as “the worst title for a film in recent memory”. If you were serious about that statement, this wouldn’t even qualify. Try “Hotel For Dogs”, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”, “The Love Guru”, “The Hottie & The Nottie”, or “Step Up 2 the Streets”. You clearly have a very short memory, either that or you’re smoking too much pot.
Paul I don’t know why you would start a review with such a un-noteworthy objection, especially when you seem to like the film as much as you do. Your goal as a reviewer should be to either encourage or discourage people from seeing a film, not pat yourself on the back with such non-sense as “the worst title for a film in recent memory”. If you were serious about that statement, this wouldn’t even qualify. Try “Hotel For Dogs”, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”, “The Love Guru”, “The Hottie & The Nottie”, or “Step Up 2 the Streets”. You clearly have a very short memory, either that or you’re smoking too much pot.
Aptitle: I don’t smoke pot. It’s a terrible title.
All of those titles you listed actually describe the movie they’re titling: Medicine for Melancholy sounds like a crappy pretentious indie movie that nobody would want to watch. It’s not apt at all.
These tiny little films have so much going against them already, I don’t understand why anyone would want to title a movie something this generic and off-putting. It doesn’t say anything about the movie, it doesn’t add to the moviegoing experience, and it’s actively off-putting.
If I didn’t know anything about the movie and I asked someone what they were about to see and they said “Oh, we’re going to see Medicine for Melancholy,” I would immediately assume that the movie they were going to go see was the French film that I described in my review. It wouldn’t pique my interest at all. Hell, I almost turned down the offer to review this movie because Medicine for Melancholy, to me, evokes images of too-skinny, sad-looking people sitting in cafes having pointless, Linklateresque discussions about existence. I only went after I read what the movie was about. At least I knew what I was in for when I went to see Hotel For Dogs. Spoiler warning: There was a hotel for dogs in it.
Paul, clearly you’re the kind of person who prefers to have a title spell something out for you instead of simply suggest something. But more importantly, and this was my point, why would you start your positive review with such an unimportant negative statement? That’s really the point I was trying to make.
If I was to bold anything from my post it would be “I don’t know why you would start a review with such a un-noteworthy objection, especially when you seem to like the film as much as you do.”
However, just to give some clarity to the title, I found a statement from the director, which if you resembled anything close to a real film journalist, you have done the research yourself to discover. Unfortunately your paper has lacked any true film journalists since Annie Wagner left and the film section has sunk to a new low.
Here’s that statement about from director Barry Jenkins from an interview conducted by Spout Blog:
“The title, I know you said at the Q&A at the film that the title was you saw the Ray Bradbury short story collection and you thought that was applicable. Now, would you say, in the film that the characters both serve as a medicine for each other’s melancholy?
I definitely think so. I think that’s why it felt OK to take Bradbury’s title. Even though the film wasn’t an adaptation of that actual short story, there are some similarities. I definitely think so. I don’t think it’s a cure for melancholy. I think it’s a medicine.
I think they both feel a little bit better about what ails them. Or, at the very least, they’ll have a better understanding of what it is that’s causing the melancholy and they can learn to work on it. And that’s why the ending isn’t a happy ending. It’s kind of an open ending. I like to use the term productive. I think it’s a productive ending, and it’s been a productive journey for the both of them.
American audiences are used to having a moment, particularly in independent films, where you don’t really know what’s going to happen a moment where it seems like it’s going to turn sinister.”
This movie is set in San Francisco. I, like the rest of the population of Seattle, have an inferiority complex in regards to San Francisco. Because I am a Seattleite, I will not enjoy a movie that puts a positive light on that California city. You are free to think that that California city is a nice play, but I know Seattle is better and Seattle has nothing to learn from any other place. Fremont is the center of the whirld. Ballard rules. I left my heart in SoDo. You can have my mojo when you pry it from my cold dead flippers.