WOODY AND LARRY ON THE SET OF WHATEVER WORKS. BUT DOES IT WORK?Sometimes 'Whatever Works' works. . . After four movies shot in Europe, Woody Allen is back in New York -- which he said was too expensive; that was his excuse for leaving -- with a screenplay written in the 1970's for the late Zero Mostel. It has evidently been tweaked and updated to fit Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." David is nothing like Mostel and it's hard not to see him merely as the ill-humored wit of cable TV and the co-creator of "Seinfeld" forced to recite Allen's lines instead of improvising his own. David isn't an actor, and has little variation in his line delivery. He comes across here as someone much meaner than either the usual Woody or his own "Curb Your Enthusiasm" alter ego. His character, Boris Yellnikoff, is a boorish, narcissistic physicist specialized, fashionably, in "string theory," who was once considered for a Nobel Prize but didn't get it and now has broken up with his hot-shot wife and moved to a cramped Village loft. He makes a small income giving abusive chess lessons to unfortunate children. He also hangs out with some local intellectuals. This is his life when a beautiful, terminally naive young woman begs him to take her in and the action of the movie begins.
Boris is not the usual nerdy, self-deprecating Woody Allen mouthpiece. Though he is paranoid, repeatedly attempts suicide, and has panic attacks, he has this enormous ego and constantly boasts of his 200 IQ "genius"-level intelligence while repetitiously describing all the rest of the world as worms and morons. He would make riding bikes on the sidewalk and using the word "mom" capital offenses; proposes that children be sent to summer concentration camps to show them what the world is like; and for a fun outing suggests a visit to the Holocaust Museum. Larry David has a very different visual style than Allen himself, is taller and wears sloppy T-shirts and Bermuda shorts or sweatpants instead of pressed chinos, Shetland sweaters and tweeds. Much of the charm and polish are gone, and in their place we get laid-back swagger. But still in the background is old jazz, Fred Astaire movies, and Beethoven.
There's a disconnect in this film. On the one hand is the protagonist, who is pessimistic, depressive and mean, yet finds beautiful women young and old attracted to him. On the other is the rest of the cast and the plot, involving a group of subsidiary characters who come and go acting out a pleasant little farce about a southern family, consisting of young runaway Melodie St. Ann Celestine (a charming Evan Rachel Wood), her mother Murietta (the able Patricia Clarkson), and her father John (an appealing Ed Begley Jr.), who separately come to Manhattan and are reborn as bohemians and sophisticates. The daughter marries Boris, but later finds love with a handsome young English actor (Henry Cavill) who lives on a houseboat. (Never fear: Boris falls onto an equally lovely older women.) The mother becomes an audacious art photographer living in a ménage à trois with a gallerist and a professor. The father realizes he is gay and lives with his new boyfriend and declares that for the first time in his adult life he is happy.
The connecting link between the protagonist's gloomy worldview and the movie's happy outcomes is a key clause in Boris' philosophy. Life sucks, so in this bitch of a world, it's okay to do anything you can to be happy -- "whatever works." (Coming to Manhattan seems to make "whatever" work much better.) Boris insists that in matters of romance there is no logic. This apparently means love can fall into your life with no effort. But still the disconnect is unresolved. And the protagonist stays out of sync with the plot, a fact accentuated by the way he not only harangues the other characters, particularly Melodie (who memorizes s and repeats everything he says, sometimes inaccurately), but repeatedly steps aside and directly addresses the audience, visibly separating himself from the action. You might at least expect Boris to come in at the end and apologize for saying so many mean things about people. Something is missing.
But that doesn't keep the movie from being wickedly funny at times, usually due to Boris' outrageous remarks. Even though his meanness and abusiveness toward everyone, particularly Melodie, wear extremely thin, the Woody Allen wit still shines through him.
In a recent interview Allen euphemistically told NPR that for him film-making "distracts me from the uncertainty of life, the inevitability of aging and death. . ." In the past he's just flat-out said it starves off depression. Stay busy: that's his mantra. His movies keep him from jumping out the window like Boris. They serve him first of all. Sometimes they serve us too. The audience during my viewing of
Whatever Works laughed louder and more often than at any other comedy I've seen this year. Nonetheless this effort to avoid Bellevue or antidepressants is a trifle, pulled down from the shelf and dusted off. It can't possibly compete with the glitter and electricity of
Match Point or
Vicky, Christina, Barcelona.
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