Woody’s on a roll with ‘Whatever Works’

By Zack McGhee | Thursday, July 9, 2009, 11:43 AM

I think it’s official that the low point of Woody Allen’s career — that long, unfortunate stretch that started with the merely annoying Small Time Crooks, reached its penultimate nadir with Jason Biggs in Anything Else, and culminated with the insufferable Melinda and Melinda (pills!) — is definitely over. Though I loathe Match Point, I’ll concede it’s a well made and captivating movie, and Cassandra’s Dream (slight but beguiling) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona are each downright laudable. Not one of them can be dismissed as a fluke or anomaly. Now, with Whatever Works, the guy’s on a bona fide roll.

Whatever Works sneaks up on you with how good it is. You may recoil, for example, when divorced loner cynic — and apparent Allen surrogate — Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) is unexpectedly saddled with a naïve runaway (Evan Rachel Wood) named Melodie, decades his junior, as a roommate. Genuflecting at Boris’ self-declared genius, Melodie is inexplicably driven to seduce Boris, and he begrudgingly marries her. Surely, I couldn’t help but think, this will be nothing more than yet another self-indulgent fantasy in which a young woman is helpless against the neuroses of a borderline geriatric, coddling his insecurities and galvanizing his egomaniacal delusions, without presenting him any real intellectual challenge. How wrong I was.

Without deviating into spoiler territory, the arrival of the luminous Patricia Clarkson as Melodie’s mother heralds a startling and welcome narrative shift. Though he leans too much on Boris’ talk-to-the-camera monologues, and his ultra-repressed southern stereotypes may invite charges of xenophobia, Allen’s script is broadly funny, and he continually defies our expectations as his true motive becomes clear: With a sexual diplomacy reminiscent of John Waters, and a playfulness not seen in Allen’s own work since perhaps Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex*, Whatever Works cheerfully suggests that by shrugging off our inhibitions and embracing everything that makes us feel strange and afraid about ourselves, we may not just find happiness, but even arrive at something pretty close to normal.

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