Whatever Works

[July 1st, 2009]

Larry David does so much kvetching in Whatever Works—so much splenetic, dyspeptic crabbing—that it begins to feel like a form of deflection on behalf of Woody Allen. Whatever you may think of Allen’s resurgence, the idea of David standing in as the director’s doppelgänger—in an updated Allen script of Annie Hall vintage, no less—has significant appeal. But the Curb Your Enthusiasm star is all aggression, all the time; he lacks the vulnerable worrywart qualities that once made the Woody character winsome. It’s no help that the movie returns to the affable Epicureanism that now passes for Allen’s philosophy, salts it with choice insults for the closed-minded and, for the umpteenth time since Deconstructing Harry, skirts any painful introspection.

You want plot? You should take the Michael Caine-Max Von Sydow rivalry from Hannah and Her Sisters and make the girl younger. Larry David is Boris Yellnikoff, a self-proclaimed genius physicist and self-evident misanthrope, who finds a baby on his doorstep. Fortunately, the baby is old enough to have sex with. Melodie St. Ann Celestine is an airhead Mississippi runaway played by Evan Rachel Wood; in their more tender moments, Boris calls her “a character out of Faulkner not unlike Benjy,” and they marry. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, or anything remotely predatory about the relationship: “She seduced me!” Boris wails, without apparent irony.

Even third-tier Woody Allen includes a laugh or three, and I’m sure they’re in there someplace. Melodie’s relations arrive one by one to New York City (Patricia Clarkson is all Loretta Lynn honeysuckle charm as her momma) and, upon exposure to the cosmopolitan city, are transformed from Bible thumpers into libertines. The hurry of these makeovers suggests preemption, as if Allen couldn’t stand to trade jokes with a competing worldview. His outlook continues to present itself as a shrugging existentialism—in favor of “any way you filch a little happiness”—but it feels closed to new discoveries. At the end of Manhattan, Mariel Hemingway delivered the glimmer-of-hope promise that “not everyone gets corrupted.” Whatever Works is the product of a sensibility so defensive, so stuck in its ways, that it has to corrupt everybody. Is is harder to have faith in people when you don’t want to look at yourself? PG-13.