Film Review: 'Whatever Works' back to base, if not top form

Jessica Miglio/Gravier Productions

Question for Woody Allen: Did you have to show us Larry David's legs instead of Evan Rachel Wood's? David plays a sour "genius" professor while Wood is the young Southern beauty queen who inexplicably falls for him in Allen's new movie, "Whatever Works," the director's first in New York in years.

You'd never guess it from my happy-go-lucky persona, so beloved by readers, but I'm a fan of dark and pessimistic world views, especially when expressed in the incongruous context of a so-called comedy by characters with little apparent reason for their assertions of superiority.

Jessica Miglio/Gravier Productions

Question for Woody Allen: Did you have to show us Larry David's legs instead of Evan Rachel Wood's? David plays a sour "genius" professor while Wood is the young Southern beauty queen who inexplicably falls for him in Allen's new movie, "Whatever Works," the director's first in New York in years.

Whatever Works

An eccentric New Yorker abandons his upper class life to lead a more bohemian existence. He meets a young girl from the south and her ...

Rating: PG-13 for sexual situations including dialogue, brief nude images and thematic material

Length: 92 minutes

Released: June 19, 2009 NY/LA

Cast: Ed Begley Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Larry David, Conleth Hill, Michael McKean

Director: Woody Allen

Writer: Woody Allen

More info and showtimes »

So even though "Whatever Works" -- the 39th (!) theatrical feature film from writer-director Woody Allen in 43 years -- is stagey, unconvincing and somewhat stale in its knee-jerk existentialism (Allen originally wrote the script in the 1970s, for Zero Mostel), it's also frequently very funny. To paraphrase a magical British nanny, a spoonful of sugar helps the misanthropy go down.

Woody Allen stand-in Larry David plays the lead kvetcher and narrator (he periodically addresses the movie

audience, to the dismay of the others in the frame), a germophobic "genius" physicist named Boris Yellnikoff. Boris is so cavalier in his insults and unpleasantness, and so dismissive of the "microbes" and "inchworms" outside his New York circle of professorial acquaintances, he's pretty amusing; thankfully, Allen never makes him endearing.

Boris rejects "the fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent," and declares, regularly and redundantly, that mankind resides within a "pointless black chaos" -- a "vast, black, unspeakably violent and indifferent universe." "We're a failed species," he proclaims, and he ought to know -- his gimp leg is the souvenir of a failed suicide by defenestration.

Enter Evan Rachel Wood as Melody St. Ann Celestine, a homeless young former beauty queen from Eden, Miss., who radiates sunshine and a Southern accent. Boris calls her "a brainless little twit" after he encounters her on the street near his apartment, but he allows her to move in for a night that -- inevitably if implausibly -- leads to a marriage that Boris (and thus Allen) acknowledges as "preposterous."

What follows is a sort of "Pygmalion" rewrite. One expects Boris to be mellowed by Melody's sweetness, but instead Melody begins to play sour notes, declaring herself an atheist and cynic (even though she never loses her perky, innocent demeanor). Still, Boris and Melody seem good for each other, at least for a while. When Boris wakes screaming from a nightmare, Melody tries to distract him from his terror by turning on the TV. "I saw the abyss," Boris declares. Responds Melody: "Don't worry, we'll watch something else."

Eventually, Melody is tracked down by her blustery father (Ed Begley Jr.) and worried mother (the invaluable Patricia Clarkson), who faints at the shocking sight of her daughter's bald, ancient, Jewish spouse. Both parents seem to represent the "family values morons" Boris disdains, but -- like the characters in such other Allen films as "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" -- they blossom into their true selves when exposed to a liberal new environment.

"Whatever Works" marks Allen's return to his New York home base after four successive movies in Europe. Unfortunately, he's also returned to the dull staging that plagued many of his pre-Europe releases. As if adhering to the journeyman philosophy of the title, "Whatever Works" is often blocked as if it were a play, with the characters directed to address each other with the unnatural articulation of actors hoping to be heard by the patrons in the ninth row.

"Whatever Works" is at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

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