Whatever Works

Whatever Works
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG-13, 92 m, 2009
Directed by Woody Allen. Stars Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, et al.

Whatever Works doesn’t work whatsoever. At first blush, the idea of Woody Allen, a neurotic, self-loathing, East Coast Jew, collaborating with Larry David, a neurotic, self-loathing, West Coast Jew, sounds inspired, but the result is about as funny as a snot bubble. After setting his last four pictures in Europe, Allen at long last returns to the Big Apple, which is photographed to look as shiny as ever, but don’t be taken in: it’s filled with worms. The biggest worm is David’s character, Boris Yellnikoff, a balding, bespectacled crank who spends his days limping about (he once tried to do a George Reeves from his apartment window) and going on and on and on about the meaninglessness of it all. When his friends have had enough of his kvetching, he turns to the camera and unloads on the poor audience. Allen himself practiced this in Annie Hall, but whereas Alvy Singer was endearingly quirky, Boris is just an annoying gasbag—a nudnik. (His name couldn’t be more fitting; it sounds like “bore us.”) Though we’re informed ad nauseam that he’s some kind of genius (his former career as a physicist culminated in a nomination for the Nobel Prize), his powers of perception are surprisingly mediocre. There’s nothing the least bit original about his thoughts on life, death, and affairs of the heart; his orations (or rants) are mundane, small-minded. (If a true intellectual were to ever come along in a Woody Allen film, he’d have this poseur for lunch.) What Whatever Works needs—and desperately—is a lovable curmudgeon, like Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men, but Boris, who’s so weirdly contemptuous of children that he makes W.C. Fields look like Father Flanagan, is downright loathsome. It took only ten minutes before I was ready to smash his face in.

Boris is long overdue for some sort of awakening, but nothing really happens in Allen’s dinky, sitcom-ish script to shake him up. If anything, Allen seems to be championing this dime store philosopher and his irresponsible “whatever works” approach to life. (In my opinion, the hedonistic 1960s and its mantra, “if it feels good, do it,” is what put American culture on the road to oblivion.) Worse, the people who come along to challenge Boris’s myopic worldview only wind up converting to it. (He deflates the hopes of those who still dare to dream and the blasted movie congratulates him for it.) One day as the old fart is hobbling home, he comes upon a young Mississippi runaway, Melodie St. Ann Celestine (!), and decides to take her in. It’s hard to say why he does it; he isn’t attracted to her mentally or physically (or so he claims), and he openly mocks her southern naiveté. Maybe he’s just bored. Or maybe—just maybe—there remains an ounce of humanity somewhere beneath all that tedious pessimism. Whatever the case, he finds in Melodie someone who’s finally vacuous and gullible enough to buy all his left-wing malarkey. And Allen can’t resist depicting Melodie as a mooncalf; she is, after all, from the reddest state in the union. (Has Allen ever even been to the South?) You might think at first that Melodie is just affecting the whole dumb blonde thing, that she’s a wily social climber who’s using Boris to gain access to the city’s more sophisticated circles. But that’s not the deal here; she really is dumb as a post. This couldn’t be more evident than when she admits to Boris that she’s fallen in love with him. (Ewww! He’s old enough to be her grandfather, for cryin’ out loud.) Allen may have written Melodie as a figure of fun, but an actress with a smidgen of talent (and integrity) would’ve found a way to fill out the role and turn it into something more than a crude Vaudeville joke. Evan Rachel Wood, I’m sorry to report, is not that actress; she’s exceptionally nondescript. Most of the time she just stares at Boris in round-eyed adoration as he prattles on about religion (he’s an atheist), politics (he’s a pinko commie from the deepest ring of Hell), and music (he’s unadventurous, and like a lot of Allen’s characters over the years, disapproving of rock ‘n’ roll). Well, in due course he succeeds in thoroughly washing Melodie’s brain, and one evening as she’s regurgitating all of the bunkum he’s fed her since they started shacking up, he convinces himself that she’s his soulmate and plights his troth to her. (Allen knows that it would creep the audience out to see these two engaged in anything even remotely intimate, so thank God or Allah or Buddha that he doesn’t go there.) Unfortunately, settling down doesn’t do much for Boris’s demeanor; he remains as big a jackass as ever.

Okay, let’s face it: The one who should be playing Boris is the Woodman. At 73, he’s too long in the tooth to even consider taking on a part like Sandy Bates or Virgil Starkwell again, but it seems to me that a petulant geezer like Boris would be an entirely appropriate role for someone his age. Lord knows he would’ve made the character more likeable than David does, and he would’ve been able to score laughs where David only invites groans (or middle finger salutes). Don’t get me wrong: David is a much more efficient surrogate for Allen than Kenneth Branagh was in Celebrity or, Heaven help us, that talentless jag-off Will Farrell was in Melinda and Melinda, but he has a hard time making Allen’s words pop. He often fumbles his lines, if he manages to recall them, and appears ill at ease, almost like he’s wearing a hair shirt. That’s too bad because David is a funny guy; I can usually count on his TV show, “Curb your Enthusiasm,” to give me a few good laughs. (I turn the channel, though, whenever that waste of flesh Wanda Sykes starts flapping her ugly gums.) But “Curb,” which is a largely improvised affair, allows David to play himself; a tightly scripted comedy like Whatever Works must leave him feeling terribly constrained. Some of the supporting players fare much better, particularly Patricia Clarkson as Melodie’s mother, Marietta. Having spent the better part of a year searching for her daughter, she literally faints when she finds her married to a senior citizen who bears an uncanny resemblance to Dominic Chianese. Of course, being a Christian and a patriot opens her up to an onslaught of Boris’s cheap zingers: When she heads off to the “little girl’s room,” he tells her, “Don’t forget to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when you sit down.” Hah.

Initially, Marietta stays in the city to find Melodie a more suitable fellah, but when one of Boris’s pals (a philosophy professor, no less) takes a liking to her snap shots, she finds herself fast becoming a celebrated photographer. Success causes her to abandon her principles (such as opposing the slaughter of unborn babies), and soon she’s just another piece of urban detritus, smoking dope and sharing her bed with two men. New York City corrupts her, though Allen is sick enough to think that his beloved town has “liberated” her. (If there’s any truth to Michael Savage’s contention that “liberalism is a mental disorder,” then Gotham is a snake pit that’s in violation of many a fire code.) It’s sad that Marietta has to forfeit her values in order to gain the respect of a bunch of degenerates, but Boris is happy as a dog with two tails to see her devolve into an amoral hosebag: “All of her deep-rooted beliefs went right down the toilet where they belong,” he enthuses. Ya know, somebody ought to flush this turd of a movie right down the toilet where it belongs.

When Marietta’s estranged husband, John (Ed Begley, Jr., whose lisp is becoming more pronounced and therefore more irritating), comes to town, he’s understandably shocked by what an appallingly dressed hussy his wife has become. Clutching his bible, he drops to his knees and beseeches the Lord for guidance, prompting a sniggering Melodie to tell him that “there’s nobody out there” and that he’s “praying to no one.” This has to be the cruelest bit Allen has ever inflicted on his audience; the thoughtful, sensitive, perhaps even God-fearing artist behind Crimes and Misdemeanors is long gone. But Allen’s ridicule of John doesn’t stop with his religious beliefs; he also pokes fun at him for being a member of the NRA. (Hey, Woody, the anti-gun laws adopted by the Weimer Republic benefited Hitler when he came to power and implemented die Endlösung der Judenfrage. Noodle on that, you schmuck!) Time in the asshole of the world leads John to discover that he’s a closet fenucca and that his guns, according to some nitwit psychiatrist, are “a manifestation of his sexual inadequacy.” So, he puts down his weapons, turns his back on Jesus, and opens a little antique shop with his new male lover (who, not surprisingly, is Jewish). Can you imagine if the tables were turned and a Christian filmmaker (if such an animal exists anymore) derided Jews in this manner? The Anti-Defamation League would raise all sorts of hell—and they’d be right to do so. But mainstream critics like Roger Ebert and Peter Travers aren’t about to call Allen out on his bigotry; their minds have been warped by untold years of political correctness, which, as I’m sure you know, disallows the mockery of anyone except white, Christian, heterosexual males.

For a movie that makes such a ruckus about the need to practice tolerance, Whatever Works has to be one of the most intolerant movies I’ve ever see. (It’s certainly the most nakedly anti-Christian.) But it’s not just the thematic elements in this turkey that leave a bad taste in your mouth: many shots are poorly framed (Harris Savides is no Sven Nykvist), the source music is bland and worked rather messily into the proceedings, and there are far too many of the sort of half-baked gags that spoiled Small Time Crooks and Broadway Danny Rose. (But as bad as those pictures were, at least they didn’t have an ax to grind.) Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s, and most of the ‘90s, Woody Allen was one of the most relevant auteurs in the biz, so it pains me to see him spend his twilight years behaving like just another liberal simp. (Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have that ground covered, thank you very much.) Whatever Works is communist propaganda, and it’s rated PG-13 so every mush-headed young’n can go and see it and come out hating the church, the South, the Second Amendment, mom, and apple pie. This is a shameful work—an obtuse, prejudiced, remarkably unfunny piece of trash.

November 11, 2009

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