MOVIE REVIEW
'Whatever Works': David-Allen combo doesn’t produce much enthusiasm
There’s a legendary story about Larry David when he was just a stand-up comic — long before, that is, he cocreated “Seinfeld” and bequeathed “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to a needful world.
He was, it seems, famous for walking up to the mic at comedy clubs, surveying the crowd with contempt and then immediately turning around and walking off after saying, “What’s the use? I can’t do this.”
WHATEVER WORKS
Two and a half stars
STARRING: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Michael McKean, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.
DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes
RATING: PG-13 for sex talk and non-graphic sexual situations.
THE LOWDOWN: Misanthropic self-styled “genius” marries a young Southern girl and finds himself re-engaged in life against his will.
“Whatever Works,” then, is, in theory, a marriage made in comedy heaven: Larry David and writer/director Woody Allen.
Ahh, just contemplate it. Think of all the time Allen spent directing people like John Cusack and Kenneth Branagh in shameless (and silly) imitations of their director, when he might have had a built-in stand-in all along with David.
David here plays the role of a dyspeptic, misanthropic, self-styled “genius” of supposedly Nobel caliber. (Only in Woody-world are former university lecturers on “string theory” impressed with themselves for, in fact, being former lecturers on “string theory.”)
He walks with a limp because he once unsuccessfully tried to kill himself with an old-fashioned window jump. He now energetically showers his friends with his occasionally entertaining omnidirectional bile and hustles chess in the park.
On the way home from one of his social harangues, he implausibly discovers a hungry young Southern woman in front of his Chinatown apartment. He takes her in and feeds her (it looks to me as if all she got were a couple crackers, but I’m no doubt being literal). And puts her up for the night.
Which leads to more nights. And sightseeing tours of New York City. And someone new to hear his venomous — and sometimes funny — denunciations of contemporary urban life. The fact that she’s a simple-hearted, undereducated former baton twirler from a born-again Southern family only gives him more juice for his bilious rhetoric.
Eventually, they marry. Which leads to her mother suddenly showing up. And her father — estranged from her mother after running off with her best friend. Soon, her whole family is up North participating in Manhattan’s Vie Bohemienne.
If Allen’s first New York movie after five films being liberated in Europe sounds like pure Broadway — maybe even a Broadway musical — it plays that way a lot of the time, too. Allen wrote the script 30 years ago for Zero Mostel and filed it away when it never got made.
If the script couldn’t stay filed, it should probably have turned up as a play rather than a movie. If ever a script needed a winnowing out-of-town run first, it’s this one.
Admittedly, some of the jokes and lines are good — but then that’s an absolute given in a Woody Allen movie, even a less-than-mediocre one like this. (See the underrated “Deconstructing Harry” for an infinitely superior variation on this character.)
David, sadly, wears out his welcome about halfway in and turns into a far less ideal Allen anti-hero than you might think. Mostly, that has to do with Allen’s directorial technique. He’s renowned for being decidedly minimalist in his instructions to actors — which is why Hollywood people have so often been so happy to give his actors Oscars. They know that the great performances in Woody Allen movies are due more to the performers and the material than the director.
David, clearly, had his hands and head full just memorizing the dialogue.
More impressive, by far, are Patricia Clarkson as the mother of the young Southern baton twirler and, especially, Evan Rachel Wood, as this wholly implausible simple-hearted girl/wife. Given the famous Allen hands-off method, Wood is, as the saying goes, something of a revelation in this movie.•
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