..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Whatever Works
Directed by Woody Allen

Twenty years ago, actor-writer-director Woody Allen -- and his new film Crimes and Misdemeanors -- were celebrated in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times, with an editorial genuflection  (a front page package of essays by three theologians discussing Allen’s fillum and its moral issues) that you might think more suitable for the recent, prestige-drenched winner of a Nobel Prize.
         
How are the Times-made-mighty fallen. Or pratfallen.  Now, in Allen‘s latest movie Whatever Works, the Nobel Prize is used as a running gag. The film’s main character Boris Yellnikov (who isn’t played by Woody, but by Wood-alike Larry David) -- a misbegotten soul whose oddball romance with Mississippi-born homeless gal Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) is the main plot --  keeps being described as string physics specialist who “almost won the Nobel Prize.”
     
I didn’t really buy the idea that this pop culture-fluent wisecracker, who sounds suspiciously like Woody, was a star physicist. And he didn’t convince me that he was up for the Nobel Prize any more than I thought Alan Rickman (as another, much less amusing smartass misanthrope) was a Nobel winner in the ridiculous kidnap thriller Nobel Son. But I did buy David as the best Woody-surrogate ever: an utterly disenchanted New Yorker with a bad, funny mouth, who loves Fred Astaire and Beethoven, always sings “Happy Birthday“ in the toilet, dismisses the children whom he teaches chess as “cretins,” and obviously suffers from extreme anaerobia. (That’s the condition of disaffection from happiness, and also the original title of Annie Hall.)
   
In the movie, Boris leaves his upscale life and wife after a failed suicide attempt, relocates himself as a Chinatown dropout scraping along teaching kids chess, and spends some talking to the audience, like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall. (Here, the other characters sometimes hear him and think he’s nuts.) Finally, he finds Melody on his doorstep. Charming but lightly learned, she‘s his perfect opposite number, a mix of Holly Golightly, Liza Doolittle, Iris from Taxi Driver, and Daisy Mae Yokum.
    
And soon, she‘s dragged some more transplanted Mississippians to Manhattan: her seemingly straight-arrow, Christian-rightwing parents Marietta and John (played wittily by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.). Naughty Marietta becomes an avant garde photographer living in a ménage a trois (with two of Boris’ buddies) and homophobic NRA gun-lover John discovers he‘s been a secret Paul Lynde all along.
      
Melody herself blossoms under Boris’ bilious tutelage, and eventually she finds a younger suitor (Henry Cavill as the absurdly good-looking actor, Randy James), setting up a New Years Eve ending that suggested to me an irresistible lower-rent, alternative-lifestyle variation on the happy climax on one of Allen‘s best-loved movies, Hannah and Her Sisters. Just to prove he isn’t a softie, Allen, through David, takes a shot at that other crowd-pleaser, It’s a Wonderful Life just before the end -- without naming the movie. (Or hitting it.)   
    
Who cares? I liked Whatever Works. It was funny. Whatever has been damned by some for not giving us anything new, but that strikes me as ageism disguised as a love of innovation or novelty. Critics who keep demanding that moviemakers blaze new trails: Aren’t they a little like the Woody of their nightmares, forever chasing younger women and fresh affairs?  What’s wrong with redoing your specialty? Many of the best movies -- or books or paintings or pieces of music -- are hardly novel. They don’t break off in new directions, as much as they re-explore and refine old ones.
     
That’s what Whatever Works does. It reimagines and rescales the terrain Allen already gave us in Manhattan, Hannah, Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Deconstructing Harry and Husbands and Wives. And you know something? We should be happy that it does. What should we expect from an artist in his 70s? We should be glad that he’s still working, still writing and directing, still prolific, still dreaming up one-liners and even still having romantic fantasies, even if they’re not complete with fantasy roles for himself any more.
      
Film history is packed with examples of later works by major filmmakers that were wrongly downgraded at first and later evaluated upwards -- and some of them are by Woody Allen, including Husbands and Wives and Sweet and Lowdown. And though it bothers me that Allen doesn’t appear (or even narrate) on screen any more -- imagine the reviews he would have gotten if he‘d dared to play Boris, a limping, foul mouthed geezer who gets hitched to a teen dream vixen -- it doesn’t really damage this movie. David delivers Allen‘s nastiest, funniest lines as if he’d made them up. Besides, according to Variety, Allen actually wrote this part, over three decades ago, not for himself but for Zero Mostel (who would have been terrific in it.)
    
As for Evan Rachel Wood, she pushed her dramatic intensity into a comic mold very successfully,  suggesting sweetness, ignorance and mental and emotional liveliness, while performing the interesting romantic fantasy function of suggesting both the Mariel Hemingway and (later)  Diane Keaton characters in Manhattan. She‘s both the faithful innocent and later the faithless semi-sophisticate. Or, to embroider the Pygmalion metaphor, she may be a Mariel whom Boris, perhaps unwisely, educates into a  Diane. (Would Keaton have been Zero‘s costar back in the ‘70s?) It’s a fine, raunchy performance,  though, at the start, she flails and flaps her hands around a little too much, and too calculatedly. Clarkson, meanwhile, does a painfully funny job as Marietta, a know-it-all dame irritating and obnoxious, as well as funny, with all the unbraked destructiveness of a truly naïve artist.    
     
However much we would have liked to hear Mostel -- or Allen -- read these lines, David cracks Woody’s verbal whips with merciless relish. The sarcastic writer-guru of Seinfeld and the actor-writer-guru of Curb Your Enthusiasm may never have convinced me he was a physicist, and maybe, he should have been a  novelist or filmmaker or TV writer instead. But David gets his laughs and Allen even gives him a poignant Chaplinesque close-up when Boris discovers (Spoiler alert for the rest of this graph and the one after it) that Melody is going to leave him.
     
For me though, the movie would have worked better if melody didn’t end up with Randy James -- an unlikable character for all his looks -- but instead left Randy afterwards for a younger, Woodier type.  Anyway, I couldn’t help suspecting that Boris, was being partly punished by a too easy acceptance of all those Woodyphobes who have expressed such distaste for watching the older Allen, or Allen surrogates, cavort with younger women. This move suggests that Allen is paying the piper, at least on screen. But, of course, Whatever Works is only a movie. And, for me, it works. 
      
Still, I would like to see him acting in a movie again. What about Woody as a combination of Henny Youngman and King Lear? Or Woody as an elder Groucho Marx type, estranged from his brothers (including Gene Wilder as Harpo)? Woody as a Manhattan Don Quixote, lost in L. A., with Seth Rogen as Sancho Panza? Woody as a Philip Roth type accused of plagiarizing a lost manuscript by Norman Mailer (played by Al Pacino) and Gore Vidal (played by Frank Langella). Woody as the Old Man and the Sea -- obsessed with killing the Macy’s Parade Snoopy balloon.  Woody as…Oh Hell, I don’t know, whatever works.  



-by Michael Wilmington

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