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If you end up inclined toward a hunch that Woody Allen's
latest, Whatever Works, signals a return to classic vintage
Woody, you're more than right. A screenplay of his that
was put aside while gathering mothballs in one of Woody's
closets for over thirty years, Whatever Works thankfully
sidesteps the woefully depressed funny man's nearly always
artificially induced panderings to the Waspy upper crust
in movies, as the raw unplugged, get-even with the cosmos
Woody shines through instead.***
Channeling Seinfeld's Larry David as his perplexed
alter ego this time around, Allen ventriloquizes David as
Boris Yellnikoff in the movie, a suicidal physicist dropout
grouchy codger with an acid tongue, who's so utterly fed
up with life and the humans inhabitating his surroundings,
that he just about kicks down the fourth wall to wail about
it, in no uncertain terms to audiences everywhere. The studios
long irking Woody aren't spared either, as Boris accuses
the studio suits of sinister intelligence operations, 'so
some Hollywood idiot can buy a bigger swimming pool.'***
Ranting on about his feelings concerning human existence
and 'a violent and indifferent universe,' via an endlessly
delirious swirl of hilariously droll one liners, Boris basically
sums it all up in his proclamation, 'All there is, is the
wooden box, and then the next generation of idiots.' Divorced
from a yapping wealthy trophy spouse he characterizes as
a 'Venus flytrap' and incap able of pulling off a successful
suicide while whining over a mosquito bite he's convinced
is melanoma, Boris relocates to a Chinatown dump where he
gets by teaching chess to kids he refers to not exactly
endearingly, as 'brainless inchworms.'***
Though it seems that fate has something quite different
in mind for the surly senior intellectual snob, when Melody
(Evan Rachel Wood), a homeless pigtailed ditzy redneck former
cheerleader hottie street kid inexplicably latches on to
him, and Boris seals their courtship by introducing her
to a knish. Though red state/blue state antagonisms eventually
boil over when Melody's yokel parents (Patricia Clarkson
and Ed Begley Jr.) turn up and rebuke their child for taking
up with an elderly loon and likely communist hermit.***
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