Unfairly decried by American critics for being familiar and overly verbose (this, in the world of Hot Tub Time Machine, is a bad thing?), Woody Allen’s Whatever Works may not rank alongside Annie Hall or Bullets Over Broadway but, as always, even Allen half-cocked is better than most in full flow. Here the authorial quirks come thick and fast from the start as Allen’s typically Allenesque protagonist Boris (Larry David) delivers a savagely misanthropic opening monologue, directly to camera, that culminates with the line: “Then the day will finally come when they put you in a box, and then it’s on to the next generation of idiots.”
Boris is an ageing, occasionally suicidal curmudgeon and former quantum physics professor who is also an amalgam of his off-camera director’s many screen personas — but, crucially, with the sympathetic pieces surgically removed. “This is not the feel-good movie of the year!” Boris barks down the lens at the beginning from outside a sunny café in downtown Manhattan. And thus the journey of the film, and of Boris himself, is to find the softness within and to palliate with love his nihilistic world view. Enter, stage left, the 21-year-old Melody (Evan Rachel Wood, a pure-hearted runaway from the Deep South who is also — very conveniently, and very Woody Allen — sexually open and eventually sexually attracted to Boris.
This is only Act I, however, in a rigidly structured and rigidly written three-act screenplay. And yes, it proves defiantly stagey, especially as the subsequent acts each open with a loud knock-knock, literally, stage right, and the entrance into Boris’s apartment of, respectively, Melody’s mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and then father John (Ed Begley Jr). But with writing this controlled, and this witty, who cares? The God-fearing Baptist Marietta, for instance, quickly becomes a Boho-chic photographer who manages a functioning ménage-à-trois with Boris’s two best friends (leading to a bravura explanation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle via a three-way romp). John, meanwhile, discovers a hitherto unexplored part of his own sexual identity, and even Melody begins to question her feelings for Boris.
It’s a quietly witty movie, it’s effortlessly performed (Wood and Clarkson especially) and, despite the initial claims of its protagonist, it is sweetly affectionate too. For, ultimately, the emotional transformation of Boris is as assured as the comic punch in lines such as: “People here have always hated foreigners — it’s the American way!”
Kevin Maher