Whatever Works

Whatever Works

By Jonathan Fisher, November 5, 2009


Whatever Works epitomises just about all the things that I don’t like about recent Woody Allen comedies. The fluidity and grace of his dialogue in movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan seems to be long gone, replaced by terminally caricatured neuroses and pretentious pop-philosophy. I’m an enormous fan of Larry David. Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm are among the funniest and most observant of all comedies. He stars in Whatever Works in a role clearly written for Woody Allen circa 1975, and his presence constantly jars. The rambling monologues, the distinctly Allen one-liners, and the irritating life philosophies just sound wrong coming out of David’s mouth.

Larry David does not come across as a pretentious person, and that is just the problem with Whatever Works. David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a neurotic New Yorker (is there any other kind in Allen’s comedies?) who offers his life philosophies to anyone who will listen. He walks with a limp that he acquired years earlier when, after a domestic argument with his girlfriend, he jumped out of his apartment window. As his luck would have it, he hit the tarp covering the building’s entrance. Boris’ claim to fame is that once, he was ‘almost’ nominated for a Nobel Prize for physics. Yeah, and I was almost nominated for a Pulitzer. It’s just that no one read my entry.

Boris is egotistical and, despite his self-deprecation, massively arrogant. He spends his time wandering around talking about how much of a genius he is, offering nuggets of profound wisdom such as ‘do whatever works to make you happy’. I’m about forty years younger than Boris, and even I’ve worked that one out.

One evening, a young woman named Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) begs Boris for some food outside his house. She’s recently moved to New York from the South, and has found herself homeless in the Big Apple. Boris hesitantly takes her in, but takes a shine to her when he discovers that she thinks he’s as awesome as.. well, as awesome as he does. They begin a relationship, and the age-old convention in Allen movies that a neurotic old crank winds up with a gorgeous young woman who idolises him is fulfilled.

The film spins around, focusing on the various conflicts within Boris and Melody’s relationship that impede their true happiness. Once again, as in most Allen comedies, the formula is this: relationship won’t work because of man’s neuroses. Repeat for ninety minutes. I might be accused of reducing many of Allen’s greatest works to a couple of sentences, but movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan had poetry and style about them. Here, Allen is riffing on jokes and characters we’ve been watching for thirty years.

Eventually Melody’s parents make their way to New York to find that their daughter has taken up with Boris. After their initial surprise and disgust that their pride and joy has taken up with such a train wreck of a man, they learn to accept that their daughter is just doing… whatever works to make her happy. Get it?

Larry David is great in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but he’s almost unwatchably bad in Whatever Works. Every line, inflection and hand gesture is self-conscious and distracting. I’m one of the biggest Woody Allen fans around, but I feel, as many others also do, that one of the great tragedies of cinema has been the last fifteen or twenty years of his career. One of the most observant, delicate, and funny of all film-makers has devolved into an overly narcissistic and conceited directors around. He’s proved in the last few years with films like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona that he can still make a good movie. Whatever Works is not one of them.