Woody Allen (2009)
Whatever Works is no great shakes – compared, that is, with Sleeper or Annie Hall or Zelig or Hannah and Her Sisters or Sweet and Lowdown. It’s still better than most other recent comedies (though not as interesting as Greenberg). I’m surprised how harshly some reviewers want to criticise Woody Allen – how meagre the reserves of goodwill he has in the bank with them appear to be. Pieces by Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman and Leo Robson in the TLS talk about how far Allen’s stock has fallen in a tone which suggests less the fury of disappointed former admirers than a willed, uneasy censoriousness. There’s an implication that Allen has only himself to blame for his decline as a film-maker because he left Mia Farrow for her (and André Previn’s) adopted daughter Soon-Yi, when the latter was in her early twenties and Allen his late fifties – as if a morally questionable person can’t be expected to make a decent movie. Of course it’s hard not be reminded of Allen’s biography by the May-to-December scenario of Whatever Works; and it’s far from the first time in one of his movies that a central relationship has concerned a man and a woman young enough to be his daughter (Manhattan, Mighty Aphrodite) – or, in the case of this latest film, granddaughter. You can understand why the particular, very explicit philosophy enshrined in the title – human existence is meaningless, enjoy it while you can, go with the lifestyle that makes you feel good – sticks in the craw of some people because of what really happened between Allen and Soon-Yi Previn. But how relevant would Allen’s personal life be to the artistic worth of his films if, say, he had left Farrow to set up home with a twenty-something stepson? Do these presumably liberal-minded critics have no sympathy for someone who was once notoriously unable to find pleasure in his closest relationships? (The name Annie Hall is alleged to derive from Allen’s original working title for the project: Anhedonia.) And how many major directors’ work has improved between their mid-sixties and their mid-seventies anyway?
In Whatever Works, all the main characters end up in a pairing that’s right for them. It’s a pat, even preachy conclusion yet there’s a lot to enjoy in the process of getting to it. On this occasion, Allen’s representative-on-film is Boris Yelnikoff, a sixtyish ex-physicist. He now spends his days teaching chess, and slagging people off – to his few friends and, talking to camera, to us. When a homeless and, in Boris’s contemptuous view, brainless twenty-year-old called Melodie, arrived in New York from deep in the Bible Belt, turns up on his doorstep, he takes her in and, within a few weeks, they’re married. Then Melodie’s God-fearing mother Marietta turns up, looking for the daughter she feared kidnapped; within a few weeks, Marietta is into ‘artistic’ photography, drugs and a ménage à trois with Boris’s friend Leo and his business partner Morgenstern. Marietta doesn’t change, however, in her disapproval of Boris – and tries to fix Melodie up with someone much nearer her own age, a young actor called Randy Lee James. Some time later Melodie’s father John arrives on the scene, in the hope of getting the family back together, but is deeply shocked by an exhibition of his ex-wife’s porno-photographs. John drowns his sorrows in a bar, in conversation with a gay man called Howard – a conversation which is enough to make John realise he’s gay too. Melodie leaves Boris for Randy. Boris, for the second time in his life, fails to commit suicide. He jumps out of his apartment window but a passing woman called Helena breaks his fall and her legs. When he visits her in hospital, she suggests they go out to dinner. The picture ends with Boris throwing a New Year party. He’s now in a relationship with Helena – as is Melodie with Randy, Marietta with Leo and Morgenstern, John with Howard. As they celebrate, Boris turns again to camera and exhorts us to have fun in life with ‘whatever works’.
The metamorphoses of Melodie’s parents are crude. Boris’s marriage to Melodie seems nothing more than a necessity of plotting. There’s the odd irredeemably crap line (like John cursing Marietta’s ‘ménage et trois … should never have trusted those goddamned French’). For the most part, though, Woody Allen can still write comic dialogue good enough to alchemise crummily conceived scenes. The meeting of John and Howard is the best example of this. John launches his tale of woe with, ‘My wife left me, you see …’ Howard says, ‘So did mine’, but it soon becomes clear his wife was male. John listens in baffled astonishment. Howard then goes on to explain his devotion to his mother. After a pause, John asks uncertainly, ‘Is your mother a woman?’ When John lets Howard know he’s a Christian and doesn’t approve of homosexuality, Howard asserts that God is gay. ‘How can you say that?’ asks John, ‘He made the blue sky, the trees, the beautiful flowers’. Howard nods: ‘He’s a decorator’. There are other cherishable punchlines. Boris, at length, reminds friends about to go out on a date that the universe is pitiless and our lives absurd before adding, ‘Don’t let me spoil your evening, though.’ There are jokes that seem dumb but are actually acute. When she learns that Boris was nearly nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics, Marietta gets it into her head that this had something to do with the Oscars (which it did – the word ‘nominated’). There are some unaccountably pleasing images too, like Gandhi peeping out from the edge of the frame in a sequence in a waxworks museum.
One thing that has declined in Woody Allen’s movies in recent years is the all-round quality of the performances. Patricia Clarkson is enjoyable as Marietta and, as her ex-husband, Ed Begley, Jr, after a desperately awkward start, gets a lot better. Evan Rachel Wood as Melodie is game and sometimes charming (as when she’s talking about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) but the role has been better done. I liked Jessica Hecht as Helena but Allen seems to have developed a baffling taste for some charmless actors – both individuals (Christopher Evan Welch, who was the narrator of Vicky Cristina Barcelona and who plays Howard) and types (uninteresting young British men – Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Match Point, Henry Cavill here in the role of Randy). Allen’s disappearance from the screen has various effects. I think his very absence makes me nostalgic for the days when he nearly always had a main part in his pictures – and having other actors playing his role has been problematic even in more successful films (John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway, for example). To start with, Larry David as Boris is rather alienating – although I’d not seen him in Curb Your Enthusiasm (or anything else) so hadn’t any preconceived idea of his screen persona, I felt that Boris’s smug misanthropy was a quality of the performer as much as the character. But David grew on me: Boris’s nastiness in dismissing Melodie from his life, when she’s wounded him by defecting to Randy, is persuasive (and recalls the ‘Hurt people hurt people’ line in Greenberg).
When Woody Allen played himself, the character had a stylised charm which lightened his pessimism. Larry David’s acidic temperament can make Boris’s nihilism bleaker – the relief from this comes from the fact that so much of Boris echoes characters incarnated in earlier films by Allen. When Boris explains that, ‘My favourite Bible character was Job’s wife: she chose death unlike that masochistic husband of hers’, it rather calls to mind Alvy Singer in Annie Hall admitting that, watching Snow White, he had sexual fantasies about the Wicked Queen. And Boris is a close relative of Woody Allen’s hypochondriac incarnations. Discussing what to have for dinner, he pleads, ‘Not that crayfish thing again – last time I thought I had thyroid cancer’. A panic attack has him gabbling, ‘I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die …’ Reassured that he’s not, he replies irritably, ‘Not now – but I’m gonna die eventually’. This is a choleric variation on the moment in Hannah and Her Sisters when Mickey Sachs is told by his doctor that he doesn’t have a brain tumour but abruptly stops feeling relieved as he makes his way home, realising this is merely a reprieve from the terminal condition he’s bound to have eventually.
As usual in a Woody Allen film, the score comprises popular tunes given a jazz arrangement. This accompaniment functions in his work as a cheerfully obstinate antidote to morbidity – almost like the invincible recording of Sophie Tucker singing ‘Some of These Days’ that makes Antoine de Roquentin’s life momentarily worth living in La Nausée. It’s no surprise that everyone here, in their different ways, rejects Christianity but Whatever Works seems more relaxed than Allen has often been about a godless universe. Even in a film as recent as Match Point (which really was a stinker), he seemed to think the operation of blind chance as the determinant of human fate was a shocking enough idea to form the basis for drama rather than comedy. The improbabilities in Whatever Works are at least played for laughs and I think they deliver them a lot more often than some harshly unforgiving young critics would have you believe.
7 July 2010
