Larry David squeezes into Woody Allen’s rumpled, neurotic little
shoes for Whatever Works, Allen’s first Manhattan-based film
since Melinda and Melinda. David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a
grouchy, mildly OCD, tattered genius who was once—he repeats and
repeats and repeats—up for a Nobel Prize in physics. Now he
spends his time condescending to people (“inchworms,” “imbeciles,” “the
family-values morons and the gun morons”), teaching angry chess to
children in the park, and failing to pull off
fourth-wall-
shattering asides to the audience. But Boris’s comfy
intellectual cocoon splits wide open when he discovers Melody St. Ann
Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, aggressively nubile) on his
doorstep, a pretty young thing fresh off the Southern-naiveté
truck. He lets her inside, is reluctantly charmed, marries her, and
finds something close to contentment. For a while. You know.
Allen, obviously, maintains his old talent for acidic quips, and
David is unparalleled in delivering them. Boris calls Melody “a
character out of Faulkner, not unlike Benjy.” When she says, “Most
colleges just turn out mindless zombie morons,” parroting one of
Boris’s standard lines, he lobs back, “You could benefit from some
classes.” And he’s passable with ye olde Allen neuroses: When someone
accuses him of not having an ulcer, he responds, “I said they
can’t FIND an ulcer—not that I don’t have one.” Wood is a
beautiful creature, but hard to like: She always seems to be fighting
an inherent coldness.
Whatever Works is a semientertaining but weirdly flat fable.
Allen wrote the script in the early ’70s, with Zero Mostel in mind as
Boris—and though he’s supposedly updated it to reflect our
current issues and obsessions (“A black man was elected president; he
still can’t get a cab in New York”), Whatever Works is
inescapably dated. Corny, in fact. Melody’s hayseed parents (Ed
Begley Jr. and the always-sublime Patricia Clarkson) show up looking
for her and wind up being transformed—they meet gay people! And
ARTISTS!—by life in the big city. There’s no subtlety, no
striation, no blending of irony and sincerity: Whatever Works is
just unselfconscious cynicism trading off with wholesale
sentimentality. It doesn’t quite work. 
I enjoyed seeing this film at the same screening as Lindy, but close enough to catch all the screen detail.
Evan Rachel Woods and Patricia Clarkson put in great performances, and Larry David played Woody Allen a bit extreme but spot on.
If you like Woody Allen films, go see it. If you like seeing southern bigots transformed into artistic urbane characters and change their sexuality, go see it.
If you don’t like any of that, go watch Transformers 2 at the Cineplex and watch the big explosions on screen – I hear Megan Fox is a great actress in that ..
Nice review. In the preview, Larry David comes down some stairs yelling, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” and someone asks if he wants an ambulance. He answers, “No, I’m not dying now, but… eventually!” The same joke was used in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, and I thought, “My god, someone’s totally ripping off Woody Allen!” and then a few seconds later I found out who. 🙁
Larry David: 62. Evan Rachel Wood: 21. That’s quite a bit more extreme even than Woody’s 61-27 romance with his wife. It makes Audrey Hepburn’s screen romances with Astaire/Peck/Grant look positively plausible.
and don’t forget her fling with Humphrey Bogart: yuck.
I am a big Woody Allen fan who has even had the patience for much of his work in the last decade or two, but this was truly awful. Never before, not even in “Curse of the Jade Scorpion” or whatever have I fought the overwhelming urge to just walk out of the theater.
The joke was not used in Hannah and Her Sisters. I just watched it last night.
David’s character Boris is a hypochondriac reminiscent of MIckey from H&HS who does at one point lay in bed and yell that he is dying, but never says “not now! eventually!” or anything remotely similar.
MIckey believes his death is immediate from the brain tumor he thinks he has. After he finds out he is going to live he still fears his eventual death and seeks religion, but he never makes this joke. I’ll concede that it does however seem like a joke he would have already made.
Randomly, I just read this review after watching Hannah and Her Sisters last night and can say the “eventually” line does appear in the film–It’s in one of the scenes where Woody Allen and Julie Kavner are talking in an office.
As for Whatever Works, I told a friend I would go see it with him, but watching the trailer again I’m going to see if he wants to just have dinner instead.
Don’t be so damn pretentious. This movie was hilarious. Dated? I really don’t see why. You have obviously never lived in the south or at least in a small southern town because the idea of homosexuality is truly alien to those people. Yes, even today. Of course all those things are in the media but the overwhelming influence of Baptist ideals trumps that. You need to do some research and step out of your analytical box before you watch a film next time.
@mchrist910-
You are a fool. Dated? Who is dated here? ummm..YOU!!
As someone who has lived in ALABAMA my whole life, I can say we DO know about/mingle with gay people everyday. Homosexuality CAN cross state lines, you know. Seattle/ San Fran/New York/etc. are not the only places that gays are “known” about.
“alien” ???
We’ve been butt-fucking out in the barn way before all you dipshit hippies decided to blindly categorize an entire region of the U.S. as “dim-witted Baptists”.
take a chill pill stein015. I never said “dim-witted” and do you know alien has another meaning other than “martians”? well it does. I lived in a small southern town my whole life as well so if you are questioning my credentials, there ya go. I didnt say it was dated either, that was my initial arguement. that is wasnt dated. For a supposed liberal, you seem very biased and presumptuous. And where in Alabama? because from my perspective, it really depends on the size of the town. I didn’t mean to offend i was just countering one arguement that the south has become accustomed to homosexuality. In my case, it hadn’t. Sorry, excuse my ability to voice an opinion.
and show me one baptist who is ok with homosexuality. dont try telling me your mother is a baptist either, you are jewish.