Blogorium Review: Whatever Works

I'm very surprised to hit two movies in one week that I enjoyed this much. It's not often the Cap'n watches two films in two days and both of them are equally enjoyable. However, I got lucky with the very funny Men Who Stare at Goats and Woody Allen's overlooked (in my eyes) Whatever Works.

Again, I blame this partially on trailer misrepresentation. I really thought, based on the ad, that Whatever Works was about making fun of Southern Religious Fundamentalists. That's the set up: Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) - the Woody Allen surrogate for 2009 - is a misanthropic New Yorker atheist who takes in hay seed hillbilly Melodie Saint Anne Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) and tolerates her incessant cluelessness. Eventually, Melodie's parents arrive (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.), and more "North meets South" hilarity ensues. See for yourself:



But that's not Whatever Works. Sure, that's a part of it, and mostly in little cyclical moments immediately after Wood, Clarkson, and Begley individually arrive. But they adapt. In fact, Boris adapts in weird ways, and the movie is less about stereotypes bouncing against each other than people finding out they can change depending on the situation. It sounds hokey, but Woody Allen pulls it off in such a way that Whatever Works may be his most upbeat film in a long time.

And maybe that's why people had so much trouble with Whatever Works. When you hear that Larry David is going to play the Woody Allen role in a Woody Allen film, you expect only greatness. You expect the most neurotic, misanthropic, self-referential movie since Annie Hall, minus any of the off-kilter optimism that Diane Keaton offered Alvie. Sometimes you get it.

Early in the film, for example, when Allen is consciously playing with the fourth wall, and Boris addresses the audience directly, to the point of informing his friends that they're all being watched, Larry David is exactly what you'd expect in the marrying of Woody Allen and Curb Your Enthusiasm. There are a few moments in the middle of the movie that return to that, mostly built around Boris asking the camera to step aside with him, but for the bulk of the narrative, that goes away.

David is also not playing Larry David as Woody Allen as Boris Yelnikoff, even if that's what you're expecting. For a while, that's what you get, but Boris is an actual character that, in all fairness, may be parts of Allen and David, but is not reflective of our stereotypical expectations of them, so I can see how Curb Your Enthusiasm fans might feel duped.

Everyone else is quite good, including Evan Rachel Wood. She's not playing the type of character the trailer makes her out to be, and it's endearing how she tries to adapt to the fact that Boris is an actual genius (something the trailer also doesn't make clear) by developing his theories for herself. Clarkson goes through the biggest change in the shortest amount of time, but it suits her character and Allen has the good sense to play down her role as a plot mechanism in splitting up Boris and Melodie (spoiler - as if you hadn't figured out that a. they get together or b. they'd split up).

Ed Begley, Jr. gets the short end of the stick with very little time to make an impression, and his character shift is probably the hardest to buy, even if Allen again manages to keep it organic. The bar scene in the trailer is actually much better than the "God is a decorator" line would lead you to believe.

Maybe I was just caught up in the way Whatever Works refuses to let cynicism rule the day, or that Woody Allen took the film we were expecting away from us and made a better movie out of it, but it worked for me. And as Boris says, that's what really counts.