Movie Review: Whatever Works (2009, Directed by Woody Allen)

It is with a heavy heart that I express my disappointment with Woody Allen’s fortieth feature film, Whatever Works. Allen is one of my favorite directors. At least five of his pictures belong in a list of my top 100 movies of all time. I am not one of those people who believe that Allen is incapable of producing quality films any more. Several recent films, such as Vicky Christina Barcelona and Match Point, prove that this is not true. While not on the level of Allen’s greatest work like Crimes and Misdemeanors or Everyone Says I Love You, these films show that the aging filmmaker is still able to create profound, witty pictures.

Alas, Whatever Works is a major miscalculation. Larry David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a New York physics professor who hates everyone and everything to such an extent that were are left to wonder how such a human being has managed to survive for so long. In fact, his nihilistic outlook on like drove him to attempt suicide once. Only an intervening canopy broke his fall to the ground out of a New York apartment window.

Yellnikoff’s word is shaken up by the sudden appearance (as if by magic) of Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a young girl from the South who has run away from home and decides that New York of all places is a great place to escape to. Hilarity and profundity ensue (supposedly) when Yellnikoff and Melodie develop a “thing” for one another. Then, Melodie’s parents, one by one, suddenly appear in New York, looking for their precious daughter. In the end, after a series of pseudo-Shakespearean bouts of culture clash and curious couplings, everyone finds some happiness and breathes a sigh of relief (except for the audience).

Reportedly, Woody Allen wrote the Whatever Works script back in the 70s, only changing a few lines here and there to make it “work” in a 21st-century world. The problem, though, is that it feels strangely out of touch with our current cultural condition. The film explores the American “cultural divide” in a simplistic and totalizing manner that fits better with the 1970s milieu of “us vs. them.” The stereotypical characters from the South are presented as caricatures that should offend anyone who has ever lived in the South or known anyone from the South. In fact, the script shows such cultural ignorance that one is forced to question whether or not Allen has ever even met anyone who doesn’t live on the East Coast.

Indeed, the message of the film seems to be that New York City is the only place on Earth worth living. Allen’s NYC worshipping was expressed much more effectively in a film like Manhattan. Woody has always presented a romanticized view of the city. This time, though, he seems to say that if you’re not living the bohemian, sexually-open life of an artist in Manhattan, you are a repressed individual who might as well give up all hope. The easy transformation Melodie’s parents experience when they move from the rural South to the urban East is offensive both to them as characters and to the city Allen loves.

The situation isn’t helped any by the acting in the film. Evan Rachel Wood broadly plays up her character’s stereotypical ditsy, naive traits to the point of absurdity. Larry David plays the protagonist as Woody Allen on a very, very bad day. Sure, Allen has always played cynical characters. However, in masterpieces such as Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters his characters still express moments of genuine humanistic concern and empathy. David’s character is no less a monster than the one created by Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein.

The nice thing about Woody is that, at least for now, there’s always a next time. The incredibly prolific Allen has been directing films at the rate of approximately one a year for the past four decades. If Allen decided to retire and never make another film, he would still have the weight of films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Everyone Says I Love You to prove him one of the most profound and engaging artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. I just hope that next time he makes a picture that “works.”