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Microbes in love.

For most of his career, Woody Allen has worked through comic or bittersweet variations  of the same themes and scenarios, both as auterist artist and as a neurotic obsessive.  For all intents and purposes, the consistency of his on-screen portrayals has created an unshakable perception that Woody Allen and “Woody Allen” are one and the same.  In the last decade or so, instead of mellowing with age, Allen’s nervous energy, existential angst, and practical, down-to-earth joie de vivre has sharpened, erupting in outright hostility.¹  Deconstructing Harry remade Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as a defensive tirade (laden with saltier profanity and frank sexuality than most of his work) against those who would indict his work for being too personal, perhaps too roman-à-clef.  Match Point revisited the moral despair of Crimes and Misdemeanors sans the Jewish heritage, but with a more 1940s-noir thriller edge: Martin Landau’s ophthalmologist hired a man to kill his unstable mistress, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers did the job himself — with a shotgun, no less.  In both cases, each murderer gets away with it.²  Hollywood Ending saw Allen’s filmmaker pack his bags for Europe, leaving behind his beloved New York, New York.  Allen’s angry philosopher, Dobel, climaxed Anything Else by trashing a stranger’s car, Walter Sobchak style, out of pure spite — a far cry from the incompetent, harmless Virgil Starkwell who tried to rob a bank with a “gub” in Take the Money and Run.

Now we have Boris Yellnikoff³ as Allen’s avatar — a former string theory physicist who spends his days kvetching with his buddies down on the corner and employing a unique brand of pedagogy to teach kids chess, which mostly consists of calling them “potzers” and occasionally dumping the chessboard and pieces over their heads.  Near the outset of the movie, Boris limps down the sidewalk, telling his audience in no uncertain terms that this is not a “feel-good” movie, bracing us for an unpleasant experience hosted by a very unlikable guy.  It’s nice to meet someone who takes pride in his misanthropy.

Boris prides himself on seeing the Big Picture, which is why he alone knows that there’s a real-world audience out there, while his friends shake their heads and search vainly for the window in reality that connects their world and ours.  Of course Allen’s audience is already familiar with his characters breaking the fourth wall: his two most acclaimed 70s films, Annie Hall and Manhattan (the films upon which his legacy probably rests) featured Allen himself addressing the audience.⁴  Manhattan’s moment is extremely brief but utterly pivotal: the final shot in the film, in which Allen casts a sardonic glance at the camera after his 17-year-old ex-girlfriend tells him he has to “have a little faith in people.”  Allen’s glance asks, “Can you believe she’s serious?”  But it’s an indulgent glance; despite the twists and turns and heartbreaks of the previous two hours, Allen’s television writer seems willing to give humanist faith another go, because it’s infinitely better than the alternative.

In Whatever Works, Isaac’s skepticism has morphed into full-blown antagonism.  Even with its roots firmly in the scorched earth of ardent atheism, the faith of Allen’s characters has always maintained a spiritual edge by taking the empathy of the audience for granted.  Intimate and consistent, the fact that “Woody Allen” has endured as an icon despite personal, real-life foibles and Allen’s attempts to distance himself from the persona by having other actors inhabit it in his films⁵ is a testament to the super-reality taken for granted.  Creating a scene in which a character communicates directly to a potential audience is one of the biggest leaps of faith you can take.  Aware that a level of reality exists of which they cannot participate, where people hold the power to observe them or create them (or write them out of existence) is not so different from belief in a higher power.  By having Boris address the (to Boris, potentially imaginary) audience with his “big picture” armchair philosophy is both a clever indictment of Boris’s egomania and an innately liturgical move.  While Boris is busy berating the “religious psychotics” who wind up on his doorstep, he offers his own monologue to the bleachers that, as far as his friends are concerned, don’t exist.  If the audience isn’t the angelic choir to which Boris preaches, Allen’s faith in the real connection formed between audiences and characters (both of which might as well be fictional inventions to the other) is deeply, ironically spiritual.

Allen, like most of his characters, is the out and proud infidel who can’t stop obsessing about God and those who believe in God.  Clearly, he has faith to spare, and if he can’t funnel it into religion, all his efforts to maintain a misanthropic stance falter in the face of his ulterior faith in human existence.  Allen writes one of his strongest female characters for Whatever Works, fully embodied by Patricia Clarkson, who will apparently never be able to stifle her incandescence.  Marietta St. Ann Celestine is no more related to the subdued, quietly defiant housewife Clarkson played in Allen’s last film, Vicky Christina Barcelona than a salamander is related to a Boeing 747, but the inner strength Clarkson brought to the surface in that last movie here splurges on a banquet of outsized mannerisms and sheer personality that play to her New Orleans roots.  Marietta sweeps into the picture on a tide of personal defeat and Bible Belt praise, only to evolve into a dynamic bohemian art sensation who winds up finding happiness in a menage a trois.  Allen’s observation that the bigness of a predisposition to religious faith finds its flipside in equally voracious consumption of tactile pleasures isn’t any newer than the confessions of St. Augustine, but he hasn’t ever stated it quite as articulately; I should say, he never thought to have Clarkson state it so eloquently on his behalf.  It’s a damned shame that her character remains in the margins, a catalyst for the change in fortune of Boris’s relationship with Marietta’s daughter, Melodie.

Evan Rachel Wood is an accomplished actor, but she doesn’t have the raw presence⁶ required for an Allen ingenue.  As much as Annie Hall leaned on the same Pygmalion arc that Whatever Works recycles, Diane Keaton possessed a unique, individual strength — like Mia Farrow, she did some of her best work under Allen’s direction, but was never subsumed by him.  Wood simply doesn’t stand out as her own woman the way Allen’s best leading women have.⁷  Though she and Clarkson march through their dialogue in lockstep, what’s needed is a tango; Wood just hasn’t matured enough, or may never mature enough to set the dance floor afire.

That’s a quality especially needed in a film that is among Allen’s least visually appealing; Whatever Works is beautifully lit and poorly shot, relying entirely upon the presence of the actors to bring it alive.  Harris Savides (who worked with David Fincher on The Game and Zodiac; provided the atmospheric dread for Jonathan Glazer’s uneven Birth; and has lensed every Gus Van Sant film since 2000’s Finding Forrester, including last year’s Milk) is only the latest in a long line of talented cinematographers to attempt to lend Allen’s films an understated grace, except that this time out, Allen seems singularly uninterested in grace — as with most of his work for the last decade, he’s more comfortable being… comfortable.  His screenplay sings with a several trademark zingers (Boris hailing Job’s wife as his personal Biblical hero and Marietta advising her daughter to ditch “that communist who sings ‘Happy Birthday’ every time he washes his hands” had me in stitches), and Boris’s constant patter of pretentious invective and noncommittal nihilism is effectively wearying.  At the same time Boris’s epicurean mantra of “whatever works” is supported by the jerry-rigged camerawork, it’s more inconsistent and off-putting than his quasi-delusional rants.  If it’s part of Allen’s aesthetic gambit, I would have much preferred something a little more nuanced than the photographic equivalent of Boris limping around in his boxers and bathrobe.  Just because he’s filming a lazy character should not allow Allen to indulge in his own slackness.

Allen’s job is to convince us that Boris is interesting, and if he can’t be bothered to find him interesting enough to pick interesting compositions, why should we care, either?  Along with the “whatever works” philosophy comes its hand-in-hand twin, “take it or leave it.”  Allen’s return to his New York stomping ground isn’t strewn with palm fronds and hosannas, it’s routine.  Having spent the last few films doing touristy travelogues of European locales, Allen brings the tourist sensibility to Boris, who has never even taken the time to see most of the sights in his hometown.  His holidays out and about with Melodie are his first exposure to some of the places that may be the only places non-residents may see on their way through the Big Apple.  It’s an interesting reversal for Allen, to make his character a stranger in his own city.  Many of his characters feel alienated, but always such an organic part of the city.  Boris Yellnikoff is also an organic outgrowth of Gotham, but he doesn’t make his home there because he loves it; this retired physicist lives in New York because of inertia.  Boris marries Melodie because she inserted herself into his life; when she leaves him, he doesn’t fight it.  He literally falls into a relationship with the woman who ultimately becomes his “happily-ever-after” life partner.

Boris would naturally balk at the characterization of his ending as “happy.”  A man who has spent the film referring to his companions as “microbes” won’t abandon misanthropy as a defensive posture any more than he’d admit a similarity between his ardent conviction that an audience exists “out there” and the religious faith of the believers he so despises.  However, Larry David may be the best casting choice Woody Allen has made in years for his on-screen alter egomaniac.  Besides a vague physical resemblance (something about the eyes and the crooked half-smile), David jaws Allen’s faux-natural patois fluently.  More importantly, he conveys the vulnerable warmth that is such an intrinsic facet of Allen’s screen appeal.  Their frustrating, human propensity toward venality, narcissism, arrogance, selfishness, and neurotic weakness considered, all of Allen’s protagonists are almost never truly bad.  Even if they are, their wrong choices are never outside the context of what any of us is capable of doing, given the right circumstances.  For the most part, they muddle through — in the case of characters played by Allen himself, they forge a path with comic barbs and effortless wit.  David incarnates these aspects with absolute comfort without ever coming across like a spotlight hog the way Allen himself tends to do.  It helps that Allen wrote some great lines for the non-leading characters, but David is a big personality at home in the world, even if his world is a closed circuit that resembles an urbane, bohemian fantasy at times more than the real world.  Allen may have laughed at the absurdity, but as played by David, Boris fully expects us to laugh at the absurdity, too; we’re in on the joke, which is highly ironic, given that his character deems himself so far above us.  That’s part of the genius of the performance, and part of the grace that Allen chose to cast David rather than play it himself.

With its warts-and-all⁸ aesthetic, linked through the bizarrely perfect casting of David, Whatever Works signals yet another variation on Allen’s long oeuvre — a slight resistance to the much ballyhooed “return to form,” but an engagingly familiar one.  Boris may protest at the outset that this film and his character are unlikable and unhappy, yet Allen still can’t resist the magic of ending the film on a festive, thoroughly optimistic note: a New Year’s celebration that destroys plausibility (it’s difficult to imagine that all those people responsible for breaking each other’s hearts could sip wine together) but upholds the fine New York tradition of auld lang syne.  Finally, when it comes down to it, neither Allen nor his dedicated grump can resist a sentimental, spiritually nourishing sendoff.  Whatever Works may not prove that Allen is an incurable romantic; it just proves that he has a little faith in people.

Edited by Tracy McCusker.

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