Sugar-coated fluff with a 1970s taste
?Woody Allen’s latest film contains a healthy dose of wish-fulfilment writes Andrew M Brown

25 June 2010

A nubile 22-year-old (Rachel Evan Wood) develops a crush on a sour, self-absorbed misanthrope (Larry David)

Whatever Works
12a cert, 92 mins

The theme of the new Woody Allen film is in the title: it does not matter how you find love, through chance meetings or unconventional partnerships, you should try “whatever works” to get you through life. It’s a straightforward message and I expect some viewers will find it trite.

At the centre of the movie you have a romance involving Larry David (of Curb Your Enthusiasm) and Rachel Evan Wood which shows that love can flourish in all kinds of pairings: David is 62, Wood is 22. And to emphasise the point, Allen devises a series of subsidiary plots in which even more unlikely matches are acted out.

The writer/director does not make an appearance himself. David stands in for Allen, in effect, as the hero, a self-absorbed misanthrope called Boris Yellnickoff. It’s the sort of character that Allen once played. Boris is a retired physicist; he taught string theory at Columbia.

A self-described “genius”, he narrowly missed winning the Nobel Prize, or so he complains.He also has obsessive-compulsive and hypochondriac characteristics. These days, he has come down in the world. He no longer works. He fills his time either drinking coffee with his buddies, who are bohemian academics, or rudely teaching chess to children. His pupils, in his words, are “mental midgets”, “cretins” and “inchworms”, like pretty much everybody else in the world as he sees it.

His marriage to a rich woman, his intellectual equal, collapsed. This accounts for his disillusionment. There is a son but he’s away at college.

When we meet Boris, he has just failed at suicide. Allen exploits the episode for humour: Boris threw himself out of the window of the family’s deluxe upper Manhattan apartment only to land on the canopy below, escaping with a leg injury.

Larry David gives the impression of hardly acting. Occasionally, he looks into the camera and addresses us, the audience, directly. His Boris is basically an entertainer: you can see why he is liked by his circle of friends. There’s humanity underneath. Also, he appears to be effortlessly attractive to nubile younger women. One, at any rate – a sweet ingénue from Mississippi, a former Miss Tupelo, called Melody St Ann Celestine (Rachel Evan Wood) – he just happens to bump into as she is hanging around outside his apartment one evening. Implausibly, she ends up lodging with him straight away.

This story contains a healthy dose of male wish-fulfilment fantasy. So, Melody develops a crush on Boris first, while he is supposed to be indifferent to her obvious lovableness. He does not notice, apparently, the way she does her hair in pretty bunches or insists on squeezing into tops that are slightly too small.

Melody, on the other hand, is blind to the fact that Boris is old, bald, selfish and possessed of a sour and nihilistic view of the world. She’s smitten by the older man’s colossal intellectual self-confidence, his love of old movies and his quirky habits. He certainly loves spouting his opinions and listening to her parrot them back, like Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.

It’s easy to see why Allen cast Rachel Evan Wood. She has the needed mixture of youthful innocence and malleability. She has a record of playing unhappy teens – as Mickey Rourke’s daughter in The Wrestler (2008) and troubled 13-year-old Tracy in Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (2003). Of course she is young enough to be Larry David’s granddaughter, and Allen’s script does face up to the age-gap problems.

Boris, inevitably, gains insight through painful experience; Melody grows up a little. In the latter part of the movie, Allen piles on farcical complications in a desperate rush. For instance, Melody’s zany mother Marietta (the excellent Patricia Clarkson) turns up from the sticks, followed by Marietta’s separated husband John (Ed Begley, Jr).

Allen’s beloved city, Manhattan — symbolised in an affectionate shot of Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery – has a liberating effect on Marietta, both sexually and artistically. She goes into business as an avant-garde photographer, living in a ménage-a-trois with a couple of academics, friends of Boris. This subplot, with the cheeky, unconventional sexual arrangements, has an old-fashioned flavour, as if Allen is looking back with misty eyes to the 1970s.

Later, Marietta’s estranged husband, John, discovers that he too is in need of sexual liberation, or realignment.

Ed Begley, Jr can be funny: here, John’s journey of self-discovery throws up comic misunderstandings in a bar, with a man called Howard. The resolution of all the storylines relies heavily on unbelievable coincidences and random happenings that conveniently tie up loose ends. Allen wants to say something about the arbitrariness of fate; still, the effect is contrived. Whatever Works is a lightweight piece. But if you watch it with an appropriate attitude – if you think of it as a sugar-coated contemporary fairy story – then you may leave the cinema in a cheery mood.