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Whatever Works

Review By: Jon Allen
JonAllen@TheCinemaSource.com

Movie Grade: C-

It’s possible that throughout Woody Allen’s 40 plus years as a surveyor of willingly neurotic and intellectually occupied protagonists, there may have been a handful of characters that projected themselves so perfectly and in the professed their longings so universally that it didn’t matter if most of them persisted on a disorienting daily routine in manic New York City of 1970’s America. His dialogue, which has always evidenced a brilliant synergetic and knowing absurdity, has afforded him one of the rare honors of the filmmaking community: an established and omnipresent platform for his work, along with the power of total creative control.

For all the glorious line readings, iconic scenes, and transcendent energy that suffused his best work, Woody Allen has just as often perched upon his legacy a stream of films that are a collective litmus test of our times. Some of them, like Love and Death, Zelig (a personal favorite), Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo – are anachronistic portrayals of morals and social mores that toy with conventions. Call it conventional then, in that Allen, in some way, has always rendered even his most disparate films with a sense of philosophical inquiry.

That pill to swallow is what makes everything in his cannon so unique, even in its most drab - Scoop, Hollywood Ending, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Celebrity – Allen, always self-aware, for better or worse, has pointed the finger at himself in some way. The fact that his muse, so to speak, is Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and now the lead in the director’s new Whatever Works, is potentially significant. David is like a carnival mirror to Allen, a funny, if somewhat frightening reminder of both Allen’s prowess and innate understanding of the run of characters that complete his history.

Whatever Works plays almost like a historical review and lightly comical farce with the airiest of premises (and I’m paraphrasing here): That in this life, with all its ups and downs, if you can find something approaching happiness or understanding in life, well, whatever works. It’s an intriguing but ultimately tired premise, one Allen has detailed so artfully and with such conviction in the past that his 42nd film is at once a carnival mirror, and also a reminder that Allen, despite his earnestness, is no longer the master of his own convictions. Rather, his characters now dictate what he is thinking and, unfortunately, most everyone in Whatever Works is naive enough to believe that their convictions are anything but tired.

Boris Yellnikof (Larry David) is a bachelor in New York City and in his estimation, total genius, both disengaged and attuned to the more deplorable qualities of life. He talks constantly to the camera to explain his modus operandi, making it ...