WHATEVER WORKS written and directed by Woody Allen, with Ed Begley Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood. A Maple Pictures release. 92 minutes. Opens Friday (June 26). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: N
After a sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic, where foreign locations made the derivative pastiches of Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream and Vicky Cristina Barcelona seem fresher than they were, Woody Allen returns to New York for a new comedy, Whatever Works.[rssbreak]
It’s like he never left. Whatever Works is just as flat, stale and generally disconnected as the last films Allen cranked out before leaving Manhattan for his dalliance with European investors.
Remember Melinda And Melinda? Anything Else? Hollywood Ending? Whatever Works is as bad as any of these – worse, maybe, because Allen has cast Larry David in the Allenesque role of Boris Yellnikoff, a misanthropic middle-aged genius who spends his days ranting about the miseries of the world until he meets a homeless teenager (Evan Rachel Wood) whose bubbly spirit and love of life lead him to readjust his perspective.
Though he does a decent enough job of playing himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, David falls well short of the mark here, barking his dialogue as quickly and sharply as possible. Watching him share the screen with Wood’s bizarre Southern naïf, I had the feeling the two of them had been digitally spliced into the same frame after the fact.
But Allen doesn’t do digital. He’s old-school all the way, to the point that he hasn’t even bothered to update any of the tired old gags in a script he wrote back in his earlier, funny period, when he produced Annie Hall and Manhattan.
He was repeating himself back then, too. Whatever Works recycles Annie Hall’s playful fourth-wall-breaking and Manhattan’s vaguely icky older-man-younger-woman dynamic, though Allen is careful to avoid any depiction of physical affection between David and Wood in a plot that turns on their falling in love, marrying and making coy Viagra references.
Despite all of Allen’s recent travels, Whatever Works feels like it was made by a man who hasn’t left his apartment in a decade.
When The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee pops up for one scene, it’s genuinely jarring. She represents such a different era of New York comedy that I was surprised Allen even knows who she is. More likely, her presence is the work of a savvy casting director if Allen had known who Bee was, surely he’d have had her do something funny.
normw@nowtoronto.com
