A while ago I wrote that if Woody Allen was looking for a new lead in his films, someone to play the Woody-like protagonist without having to cast his ageing self, then he should note that Jerry Seinfeld seemed to have time on his hands.
I doubt very much that Allen read that note, but for his new film,Whatever Works, he has done the next best thing: he has cast Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and star of TV’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It’s a good idea. David plays Boris Yellnikoff, and he sure does a lot of yelling. When he isn’t yelling, he’s being sarcastic and bitter-tongued about most things. He’s what you’d call in Yiddish a farkrimenis, a term for a misery-guts that, to me at least, sounds like a good word for sour milk.
A former professor of quantum mechanics who, by his own (repeated) account, narrowly missed getting a Nobel Prize, Boris has the kind of intelligence that sees through all the pretences and blind hopefulnesses of the world — and behind them, he espies, lies the abyss. As befits a quantum physicist, perhaps, he has looked into the abyss, and the abyss has looked back. Instead of seeing all those lovely little quantum particles (or strings, or whatever) dancing about, he sees only darkness. For him, the world is a place of chaos, meaninglessness and suffering, and most of the rest of humanity, whom Boris uniformly describes as “imbeciles”, can’t see that, which just increases his contempt for them.
You’ve got to wonder why Boris doesn’t take the view of the Allen character in Deconstrucing Harry, who brusquely tells his ex-wife (I think it was), something like: “We’re alone in a godless universe. So sue me.” Obviously, though, Boris’s splenetic outbursts are meant to outline his character and to make us laugh.
All this is indeed very amusing, especially when contrasted with the endlessly sunny outlook supplied by a young woman (Evan Rachel Wood) who lands on Boris’s doorstep and becomes a part of his otherwise constrained life. She glories in the flavourfully Southern name Melody St Anne Celestine, and she’s a former small-town beauty queen who has run away from that small town and its restrictive mentality. She’s the pretty melody set against Boris’s yell.
At this point, Whatever Works becomes a romantic comedy. Allen’s penchant for pairing some ancient bespectacled intellectual (usually himself) with a young female beauty barely on the cusp of nubility is, here, more believable than in some of his films of the past decade or so. The contrast in attitudes between Boris and Melody is the comedy as well as the romance; such things work best when the pairing seems unlikely. Yet the meshing of these two personalities also feels right, given the set-up.
It is also around this stage that the movie opens out into a world, and a series of stories, wider than Boris’s own view into the darkness. Suddenly there are more characters at play in the fields of the narrative, with a particularly pungent role for that wonderful actor Patricia Clarkson (who popped up in Allen’s previous film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, without really having been given enough to do). Now, swirling around Boris and Melody, there are various harmonic lines, diverging and converging.
If some of them (that featuring Melody’s father, especially) feel a little glib, that is just the way it goes; this is not a Bergman movie. Nor is it Hannah and Her Sisters, to mention just one of Allen’s greatest films. And here comes the ritual disclaimer one has to make about Allen’s later films: Whatever Works is not one of his greatest, but it’s very enjoyable.
It has a lightness about it, even when it comes to Boris’s bile (and you can see how that is a set-up), and a light-handedness that the viewer can only applaud.
Early on in the film, Boris (who can see not just the abyss but also the audience) tells us frankly: “This is not the feelgood movie of the year.” But Whatever Works is more feelgood than many that claim to be.