After a failed suicide attempt, brilliant New York misanthrope Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) forsakes his posh upper-class existence for meager accommodations in Chinatown. He meets his exact opposite in Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a pageant queen from the Deep South who's long on sweetness but short on smarts. Surprisingly, Boris and Melody marry, but the sparks really fly when Melody's born-again Christian mother (Patricia Clarkson) arrives and finds liberation instead of damnation in Whatever Works.
Boris Yellnikoff (David), a classic version of the Allen protagonist, is a New York intellectual obsessed with his own mortality. Boris may be a string theorist whose genius almost snared him a Nobel Prize, but his true calling is as a professional neurotic. Boris often seems happier when he's miserable. Lord knows he tries to make lemons when life gives him lemonade. Boris dumps his rich, highly compatible wife and jumps out of a window intent to end it all. Since the universe has a twisted sense of humor, he survives and thus has something else to grumble about. Moving on, Boris finds contentment living alone and following his routines--or as much contentment as an agitated misanthrope can have--but his life gets upended when he meets Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Wood), a beauty pageant queen from Mississippi who has run away from home to make it in the Big Apple. With little more than a high school letterman's jacket to her name, Melodie needs a place to stay--temporarily, of course. He's resistant to having his space invaded but eventually agrees to let her crash for a night or two. Then a funny thing happens. Boris discovers that he doesn't mind having Melodie around. She listens with rapt attention to his rants about people and accepts his theories and cultured tastes as her own. Boris kvetches about stupid people a lot, but David's body language tends to reflect an attitude of humored indifference. Allen also eases up on coming off like a crank when it becomes clear that Boris' intolerance and ritual bound behavior, such as his hand washing, are just secular versions of the religious dogma he rejects. Boris may not be a big stretch for David to play, but he makes a consistently funny curmudgeon. Wood ends up being a better foil for David than expected and makes Melodie sufficiently convincing in the story, which is a pretty tall order. At first her airheaded, molasses-accented character seems like the worst of Allen's conception of non-New Yorkers, but Wood's bright-eyed, irony-free performance has charm and innocence to nicely offset the film's aged astringency. Allen continues to paint a target on his back by having another pretty young thing go gaga for an old man. The May/December romance in Whatever Works is pretty implausible. Thankfully it's the amusing collision of the brainy and the ditsy that matters more. Whatever Works takes a serious downturn in the second half when the focus drifts from Boris. Melodie's mother Marietta (Clarkson) turns up at his door looking for her daughter, and later on her father John (Ed Begley Jr.) appears too. Not only do the awakenings of these southern conservatives to New York liberalism feel like Allen at his laziest, but also their arcs are just not that funny, interesting, or developed.
Boris is deplorable, abusing the children he tutors in chess, cruelly belittling his friends and the women in his life, nourished only by a hollow routine and a diet of gall, spite and rancor. In plotting right out of a screwball comedy, he stumbles one evening upon Melodie St. Ann Celestine, a new-fangled mixed-up Southern belle. Malleable and naïve, she begs a bite to eat and a couch to sleep on, and soon enough she enters and alters Boris's entire life and world. After a time, her mother Marietta joins the scene, and the permutations and metamorphoses expand comically, sensually, charmingly. The trio of central actors plays beautifully, even if they sometimes butt against material that's been written somewhat programmatically or telegraphically. David is fluent and caustic yet somehow approachable; Wood's ditzy sprite is played with wit and verve; and Clarkson is a ball of drollery and fire. I have to admit that I've never been a Woody Allen fan, but I enjoyed "Vicky, Christina, Barcelona" and this was just okay for me, but like Boris and the title says..."Whatever works." A 3 on my "Go See" scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment