Whatever Works

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source: Whatever Works

As a former New Yorker myself with some understanding of the culture of the City and State from where I hail, I feel I can give an unbiased and honest assessment of Woody Allen's ten billionth love letter to the Big Apple. And that assessment can be summed up as *fart noise*. Seriously though, this movie is a god awful exercise in navel gazing and seems to exist for no other reason than to confirm every terrible thing anyone ever said about the East Coast. Larry David plays a thinly veiled Woody Allen stand in who immediately finds love and sex with a woman forty years younger than him while constantly whining about his life in a way that makes both his character and everyone else's character seem unlikable. David's character in any other movie would seem like an anti-Semitic dog whistle if not for the fact that Allen is himself a walking, talking Jewish stereotype so the most I can say is that the film probably isn't a hate crime against the Jews. The running plot of the film is thin and annoying but it can be summed up as an insult to both New Yorkers and to Mid-westerners at the same time. New Yorkers should be scandalized by Allen's assessment of their day to day lives as nothing more than a series of hippie/hipster/radical liberal stereotypes who gaze into their navels so hard that it gives them eye problems. While I'm sure there's some truth to these thinly veiled stereotypes, their use in this manner seems to surpass satire and become a grating affront. Meanwhile, Allen's assessment of people from Flyover states seems to swing between infuriating to disgusting as he assesses these poor, unwashed ignoramuses as both repressed Luddites and easily seduced bumpkins that will abandon all of their closely held beliefs and relationships at the mere mention of the siren song of New York's shopping and baby boomer three ways (seriously, that's literally how one character decides to move to New York permanently). At times, you wonder if Woody Allen has ever met anyone from west of Staten Island or north of Yonkers. Also Allen's normally tight direction seems to have sat this movie out as he seems incapable of getting a decent performance from normally talented actors like Evan Rachel Wood or Patricia Clarkson. In fact I feel sorry for Wood since this entire film seems like one long creepy love letter to young flesh as glimpsed by an elderly horn dog. Henry Cavill shows up to be his usual, boring slab of meat self because even Woody Allen can't summon up the self delusion needed to believe Evan Rachel Wood's character would remain with Larry David's character. Generally the whole film seems designed to get a quick pay check and to allow some of Allen's few remaining fans to leave the nursing home for a few hours. It's just a really bad movie, frankly.

I used to be a Woody Allen fan, but this movie was so disturbing as to make me change my mind. Basically it tells the story of a selfish, sloppy, arrogant and deeply troubled elderly man who has a gift for unhappiness. However and regardless of the fact that he is penniless, sarcastic, badly dressed and very unattractive on every levels (and lives in a dump), he still manages to attract beautiful young women, thanks to his intellectual superiority. Oh, by the way he also manages to live happily ever after…. OK, I just don't buy it. This is clearly a fairy tale, Allen-style: elderly, ugly wimp gets the princess because he is so clever. He may be sincere in his belief, however I truly doubt any attraction a girl might feel for elderly gentlemen would be totally unrelated to their bank account. To put it cynically, I would have bought the Melodie-Boris love story if Boris had lots of cash. Considering his financial situation, the whole thing is preposterous. Besides, Allen likes to suggest that sex is the only basis for most relationships, but fails to explain how it is possible that somebody in her twenties might find the body of a man over sixty more attractive than the body of a Calvin Klein model. Of course, he is actually suggesting that women are after the male mind, but this just proves that he has little to no clue about women. Even if they are not just after cash and muscular bodies, I think a warm personality and a generous, affectionate disposition are considered more attractive than a Boris-type of guy. Moreover, every other relationship described in the movie is sexual (threesome, gay, etc..) conveying a sleaziness which by now seems to be the trademark of Allen's movies, more than his by now defunct witticism. And the poor Scarlett, at the ripe old age of 25 has already been replaced as Woody's muse by somebody a good 3 years younger…. Really not creepy at all.

I'm one of those die hard Woody fans and I now have three films categorized as truly unwatchable. 1) Anything Else 2) Scoop 3) Whatever Works My summary: Character says "Whatever Works".... Stuff Happens... Character says "Whatever Works"... Credits. It could have made a really good drama, but as comedy? Nothing worked at all. Larry David needed to have at least one genuine, human moment. Sadly, there was none. Pass on this one folks.. I've seen "Vicki Christina Barcelona" 3 times and it just keeps getting better! I found "Love and Death" on VHS at a yard sale.. WoW!! Soooo endlessly funny!!! I just got back my DVD of "Crimes and Misdemeanors" last week from a friend.."It's just Tragedy plus Time.." "If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it isn't." "God is a commodity I can't afford..." Great stuff here!! I was thinking about re-renting "Another Woman" recently. I love when Ian Holm says "I accept your condemnation." Gene Hackman is excellent as well, (ignore that the film borrows heavily from "Wild Strawberries.") You know? I caught a random 10 minutes of "Shadows and Fog" recently on YouTube and WOW! Though not his greatest, a random 10 minutes is INFINITELY better than "Whatever Works." Heck, I'd watch "Hollywood Ending" a second time..

I've just come from an advanced screening of this film here in Australia and must say that this movie had me cringing from the opening scene. That it is allegorical of Woody Allen's life is obvious. What makes the movie cringeworthy is the utter selfishness of every character. We're meant to have empathy for David's misanthropic character? Or his bimbo wife who ultimately cheats on him, or the sleazy guy who has no qualms about taking another man's wife? Her mother is a character who, like her ex-husband, undergoes a totally unbelievable transformation, and the denouement has all the characters who have either betrayed or been betrayed happy together. C'mon. This a movie with no heart, only selfish, unbelievable characters doing unbelievable things. If this movie is meant to be Woody Allen's exculpation of his own deeds, it fails and fails miserably.

The new comedy (if you want to call it a comedy), Whatever Works is written and directed by one of the funniest people alive, Woody Allen. It stars another one of the funniest people alive, Larry David. Woody Allen's career consist of some of the funniest movies ever. Larry David is hilarious in one of my favorite T.V. shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Somehow these two men have managed to make a laugh free comedy. Larry David stars as Boris, a man who hates the world and everything and everyone in it. One day he is walking back to his house, and a girl named Melodie (the talented Evan Rachel Wood who is wasted here) forces Boris to let her live with him. When her parents (the talented and also wasted here Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, JR) figure out, they disapprove. This all becomes a cruel, mean hearted, laugh free, and stupid comedy. Apparently Woody Allen wrote it back in the 70's, and it got boxed. It should of stayed there and rotted. Woody Allen has made an unforgivably unfunny film that no matter how hard it tries, it never works, and doesn't produce one laugh. By the way, it's a one-joke movie, and the joke is one of the worst jokes ever. The joke is that Melodie follows Boris's rules and beliefs even though they are terrible rules and beliefs. I hated, hated, hated this movie. Skip It.

"Sometimes a cliché is finally the best way to make one's point." Boris (Larry David) Woody Allen's witty movies may seem clichéd (love does indeed conquer all in most of his romcoms), but they do make a humanistic point couched in Allen's pessimism and nerdiness. With Larry David playing another Allen alter ego, Boris, a self-proclaimed genius, this misanthrope in Whatever Works is the best characterization of Allen in his recent movies. The movie works for me as the smartest, most enjoyable of this summer with a message countering Allen and his alter ego's world-weariness. It doesn't take long to look at David's work co-creating Seinfeld and starring in his own Curb Your Enthusiasm to see that this world-weary worry wart is a good choice to play an Allen-like New York Jewish intellectual. Unfortunately his lack of real acting talent is a hindrance, especially when he slips into shouting many of his lines. Yet when David plays himself more than the stuttering Allen, he becomes relaxed and believable. When David speaks to the audience several times, the sincerity is powerful. Allen wanted Zero Mostel to play this part; his death in 1977 put the script in mothballs for decades. As an accomplished Broadway and film actor, Mostel underscores David's limited acting range. The conceit of Whatever Works is that older Boris in his 60's hooks up with twenty-year-old Southern Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) despite his genius mind rejecting the whole affair as trite but his heart going with "whatever works." Throughout, Allen juxtaposes the Southern innocence with Northern experience creating a situation where NYC actually transforms the Southerners into urban sybarites, no better exemplified than the transformation of Melodie's mom (Patricia Clarkson) from bible thumper to artist humper with avant garde photos and multiple lovers. Even her ex-husband, John (Ed Begley, Jr.), has a NYC epiphany of the sexual kind. Although Allen has his characters looking for love with results that will remind you of his Everyone Says I Love You, the sweetness is replaced with a philosophy that encourages searching out whatever works because of the transitory nature of love and life. The mixture of love and cynicism allows deep appreciation of irony and the transformative nature of experience.

First, just so you know, I'm writing this review from France... but I'm from the U.S. That, so you don't disregard this as yet another Franco-Allen fan (they've exchanged their Jerry Lewis passion for Woody over here, and sanction everything he does). Also, disclaimer: I really like and respect Woody Allen's work and I'm also an ex New Yorker. With a Jewish wife, no less. So no, okay, I'm not unbiased. All that said... I fully agree with "boyden" in that this movie is far better than the reviews it gets from critics. On rottentomatoes.com, for instance, this garnered a 45% rating. That's on par with non-hits like "Gigli" etc. Yet, the dialogue was great... Larry David was as close to a Woody Allen substitute as anyone has come in a long time (Allen always casts people he can direct to sound like him, it seems)... and it made me crave that old New York, before the money of the recent pre-bust boom turned it into a homogenized has-been of a city. Evan Rachel Wood, by the way, was overwhelmingly charming. And I thought all the other acting was excellent too, in the way people act in Woody Allen movies... which is ALWAYS different from what it is in other films (you occasionally get those moments where the lines are crafted or improvised rather than somewhere in the middle). At any rate, it's amazing the size of the disconnect between fan response and the response of the critics... who, in my opinion, should go watch Annie Hall and Sleeper and the like so they can remember again.

Well, my first review for the IMDb. I picked one that I thought I was not going to like, but I like Woody Allen, so I gave it a shot. I thought I would not like Whatever Works, because I read and heard some of the critics' negative reviews. So, the first ten to fifteen minutes or so into the movie, I'm thinking that Larry David is better at improvising, as on his own show, than doing someone else's lines, albeit Woody Allen's. But then, as usually is the case with Mr. Allen;s movies, I got hooked half way through. I got hooked because it was very well done. The story, the direction, the acting - yes, Larry David was perfect for this. It was a risky casting move on Mr. Allen's part, but it worked beautifully. I like it also because Mr. Allen interjects philosophy in all of his movies. He courageously exposes himself, allows us to hear his thoughts and does these things by seducing us with entertainment. Excellent work. The only thing I wasn't crazy about was the sort of "tying up" philosophy about how we should go with whatever works. Such a happy ending. Why? That said, id didn't interfere with my overall appreciation of the movie.