Whatever Works

Evidence that Woody Allen's return to making films in America--it's his first since 2004 ("Melinda and Melinda")--comes with the loss of his mind. Adapted from a script Allen wrote 30 years ago, "Whatever Works" is a desperate attempt at comedy that only relaxes its death grip whenever Allen's alter ego Boris Yellnikoff (grossly played by Larry David) is absent from the screen. The movie starts off with a fourth-wall-breaking rant by Boris, doing a bad Woody Allen impersonation, about what a joke life is and how its everyone's duty to "filtch" whatever amount of joy they can from this cruel world. Then Boris, a suicidal retired college professor, has the good fortune to share his downtown Manhattan apartment with Melody (Evan Rachel Wood) a newly arrived runaway (she's 17) from the South whose sublime ignorance provides an empty vessel for Boris to fill with his grumpy ideas and poisonous opinions. At first Boris deflects the randy nymph's advances with a stream of hostility-fuelled barbs, but eventually enters into a doomed marriage with the girl who is roughly a fourth of his age. Boris' and Melody's quaint domestic life is upset when her religious-right mother Marietta (well played by Patricia Clarkson) shows up at the door in several month's advance of her ex-husband (Ed Begley). Old men and young girls sharing romance is a card that Woody Allen has overplayed throughout his career, and it's a trope that has run out of steam. Here's a movie that feels thrown together as if Allen is attempting to purge as many films as he can before he leaves the earthbound world. His legacy is going in an emotionally threadbare direction.
Rated PG-13. 92 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)