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It wasn't until I got back home tonight from watching Woody Allen's latest film, Whatever Works, that I found out online that today is Larry David's birthday, so I guess the first appropriate thing to do in this review is to wish the comedian a happy birthday. I've had many a laugh thanks to both Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he probably deserves most of the credit for that amusement. It's interesting that I just happened to go see Whatever Works on David's birthday, especially because, in the film, Allen employs the "Happy Birthday" song as a way to channel his well-documented hypochondria through the film's main character, who is played by David, and sings the song twice as a way to time himself while washing his hands.
During the movie's first scene the "fourth wall" of cinema is broken, as we get a monologue from David's character, the curmudgeonly Boris Yelnikoff, who we find out has the same nihilistic view on life that we've seen displayed so often by characters in Allen's films. The monologue goes on for way too long and the ideas become repetitive (you almost want to say "okay, we get it, you hate the human race"), but the good thing is that David oddly manages to be funnily charismatic as this crotchety character, so it makes the overlong tirades that Allen went on while writing the script feel bearable.
It all gets even more pleasant, though, when Evan Rachel Wood (one of today's best young actresses) graces the screen as blissful ignorance incarnate, Melodie. The juxtaposition of Boris' misanthropic and over-intellectual persona with Melodie's smiling southern charm is great. This is a case in which the two actors haven't exactly been provided with the best possible lines of dialogue by the script, but their interaction alone is enough to make the film engrossing. Not only is Wood's southern accent dead-on, but her performance is absolutely wonderful. She impressed last year in her (unfortunately) limited screen time in The Wrestler, and she was even more amazing in The Life Before Her Eyes. She has lighter material to work with in Whatever Works, but she still delivers full-force, and the character of Melodie alone would make for a good film. Once the character of Melodie's mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), shows up about halfway through the film, we start seeing a little less of Melodie, which is a bit disappointing, though Patricia Clarkson certainly makes her character's hard-to-believe transformation at least enjoyable to watch.
Some will inevitably be turned off or outraged that the film depicts a relationship between a man as old as Boris and a woman as young as Melodie. They'll be even more incredulous (at least I was) as they watch Melodie reject the gorgeous (and much younger) Randy James (Henry Cavill) out of respect for her commitment to Boris. The good thing is, though, that the way things ULTIMATELY turn out makes a lot of sense and is pretty grounded in reality. Allen seems to make the point that three conservative, traditional southerners from Mississippi could come to New York and "find" themselves, discovering things they would've never expected they had in them. This may seem like a stretch, but Allen handles it with enough subtlety that it isn't insulting by any means. We even believe the realization that Melodie's father, John (Ed Begley Jr.), has towards the end (and the delivery of the line "God is gay" in this scene is absolutely hilarious). All in all, the film works as a whole because it ends on a surprisingly positive note in spite of the director's well-known pessimistic worldview, and the message that he's trying to get across here is far more accessible than what he tried to get across last year with the incredibly disappointing Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which posed as an exotic tale of romance but was really a prejudiced film that had little to say other than "Americans are boring and obsessed with technology, while Europeans are bohemian and fun."
The banter in Whatever Works is more smile-inducing than riotous (there are perhaps two or three truly laugh-out-loud moments), which is why this falls short of the greatness of the comedic triumphs that Allen gave us with Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors, despite the fact that rumor has it that the script for Whatever Works was actually written around the time that those two films came out, and Allen just never got around to filming it till now. While the director's recent success with the amazing Match Point remains, well, unmatched by the other films he has given us during this decade, Whatever Works is evidence that he can still turn in quality cinema.
6/10
