"I'm surrounded by microbes!" (Whatever Works (DVD))

Member Name: Jake Speed

Product:	Whatever Works (DVD)
Date:	04/11/09 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good first half

Disadvantages: So-so second half

Whatever Works is a darkly comic 2009 film written and directed by Woody Allen. The film features Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David as cranky Boris Yelnikoff, a former string-theory professor and all round neurotic curmudgeon who has a rather bleak view of life and doesn't suffer fools gladly. Boris breaks the fourth wall at the beginning of Whatever Works and dispenses a long monologue expressing his theories and thoughts on existence, human beings ("We're a failed species!") and his own recent experiences. "Incidentally," says Boris. "Don't think I'm bitter because of some personal setback. By the standards of a mindless, barbaric civilization, I've been pretty lucky. I was married to a beautiful woman who had family money. For years we lived on Beekman Place. I taught at Columbia. String theory." A few years before, we learn, Boris woke up in a blind panic at the thought of the universe expanding and his own mortality and attempted suicide by jumping out of the window - only to be saved by a canopy. Since then he has divorced and retreated from the world and human beings, only surfacing from his ramshackle apartment to see his few friends and teach children chess. "Your son's an imbecile!" Boris shouts at one parent. "You should teach him tiddly winks, not chess."

One night though, Boris returns home to find naïve 21-year-old Southern waif Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) lying on the steps outside. Melodie has run away from her nutty Christian family in Mississippi and is desperate for something to eat and somewhere to stay. Despite the huge gulf in their ages, backgrounds and intelligence, Boris reluctantly allows Melodie to stop over and is surprised to find himself developing feelings for her. As this mismatched pair marry and learn something new about life from each other's very different perspective, matters are eventually complicated by the arrival of Melodie's conservative parents Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (Ed Begley Jr). "I'm her husband," says Boris to Melodie's father John. "You want to pass out here or go in the living room?"

Woody Allen's first film in New York for several years starts promisingly enough with the familiar minimalist titles and the warm tones of Groucho Marx singing Hello I Must Be Going with Margaret Dumont. The song is an appropriate choice, fitting both the nostalgic feel of Whatever Works and expressing the less than cheerful philosophy of nihilistic pessimist Boris who is given Allen's existential obsession with death. "They put you in a box," says the misanthropic Boris. "And it's on to the next generation of idiots." As the film begins, Boris is chatting outside to some friends (including Spinal Tap star Michael McKean as Joe) but leaves them to wander over to us and talk directly to the camera - à la the opening scene of Annie Hall. Boris can see us but his friends can't because only he - he believes - can see the "whole picture" and the universe for what it is. "I'm a man with a huge worldview. I'm surrounded by microbes!"

The stress on luck as the most powerful force in our lives is nothing new for Woody Allen and wheeled out here again with his usual cosmic ruminations transmitted through Larry David. The device whereby Boris sometimes speaks to the camera is rather clunky but serves its purpose
although David - more a comedian than an actor - is more at home with deadpan comic insults than wordy monologues. "My father committed suicide because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror, and corruption, and ignorance, and poverty, and genocide, and AIDS, and global warming, and terrorism, and the family value morons, and the gun morons." Interestingly, Whatever Works was originally written in the seventies as a vehicle for Zero Mostel but shelved when Mostel died. Allen claims he dusted it off with few changes and the unusually large number of jokes inherent in the script perhaps bears this out.

Although the touches of warmth that Mostel might have brought to the part could have possibly helped here on a few occasions, David, more restrained than in his Curb Your Enthusiasm mode, deserves credit for never making the cantankerous Boris completely unlikable. He dispenses some of the cynical comic lines with an amusing almost tongue-in-cheek relish although struggles sometimes - like other actors in previous Allen films - to make Allen's dialogue sound completely like his own natural thoughts and voice.

Evan Rachel Wood is endearing enough as Melodie although the character is never one you really believe in as a real person but rather a blank wall for Boris to bounce cynical bon mots and nuggets of wisdom off. You don't believe for a second that Wood would marry or have much interest in Larry David's intellectual Victor Meldrew - even if he was brilliant and a genius - and there is never any romantic chemistry whatsoever between them. The possible wish fulfillment angle to the story uncomfortably evokes Allen's real life troubles of the early nineties although the message here is quite literally whatever works, however unorthodox. "That's why I can't say enough times," says Boris. "Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works." As in his 1980 film Stardust Memories, Allen's message is to snatch at fleeting moments of happiness to get through life.

One problem with Whatever Works is that it loses focus in the second half when the enjoyably grumpy day to day life of Larry David's Boris has to give way ever more to Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr as Melodie's rather stereotypical Southern parents. Clarkson's Marietta arrives in New York as a prim Evangelical conservative and, in yet another Woody Allen cultural/social makeover subplot, is transformed into a nude photographer with arty friends and an ongoing ménage-à-trois with two admirers. Begley's John is the archetypal bible bashing reactionary ("Why do all the religious psychotics wind up praying on my doorstep?" asks Boris when John arrives) but finds himself questioning who he really is once in the liberal environs of the Big Apple. There's a fairly obvious liberal message/fantasy here about living your life according to who you are rather than rigid beliefs and - while there are some amusing moments along the way - the fixation on these comic Southerners and their New York adventures ultimately palls in contrast to the gentle and absorbing atmosphere created by David and his endless humorous rants and insults in the first half of the picture.

Clarkson and Begley Jr are both fine in their roles though but the unfeasibly handsome Henry Cavill isn't given an awful lot to do in his smallish bit as a suave actor who takes a shine to Melodie and makes her question her future with Boris. Whatever Works works best when it focuses on Boris and loses something when these new characters are introduced. The film is at its most engaging with David and Wood together in little moments such as Boris coming downstairs at some unearthly hour after a panic attack and being pacified by finding a Fred Astaire film playing on the television. Like Cecillia in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, only art and fantasy makes life bearable for Boris sometimes.

Despite the bleakness of some of the themes, Whatever Works is generally amusing and ends on a relatively upbeat note suggesting that Woody Allen is perhaps not the world's greatest pessimist despite all the existential angst. This is a film that fans of Allen and Larry David will enjoy although it does lose its way a little after a very good first half that concentrates almost entirely on David. Pretty good on the whole although, obviously, not a patch on Allen's best pictures of the seventies and eighties.

Summary: Amusing comedy