Work It

Woody Allen dusts off an old script and reinvigorates his formula in the process.

by Sam Adams

Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), the dyspeptic hero of Woody Allen's Whatever Works, wastes no time in letting the audience know where he's coming from. "Let me tell you right off," he says right into the lens. "I'm not a likable guy."

In fact, that's putting it mildly, which is as close to modesty as Boris gets. A self-proclaimed genius who claims to have been a near-miss Nobel laureate in physics, he regards most of the human race as "inchworms," submental cretins who aren't fit to inhabit the same universe he does. Needless to say, he lives alone in threadbare semisqualor, earning a meager living by drilling unsuspecting children in the finer points of chess.

What follows is no surprise to anyone familiar with Allen's last several dozen films. Boris meets an innocent and much younger woman — a Southern runaway named Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) with golden pigtails and a guileless smile — and the two fall ever so improbably in love.

Allen's penchant for pairing increasingly older leading men with nubile actresses in their early 20s has gone beyond parody into a kind of fugue state. Most of the time, it's as if even he doesn't expect us to buy it, but he's helpless to do otherwise. But Whatever Works reinvigorates the formula, in part because the script was written before it was established. Faced with the looming threat of a writers strike, Allen dusted off a script he'd written in the '70s for Zero Mostel, who died before they could make it, updated it with references to string theory, and voilà! Instant Woody.

The three-decade-plus gap between the conception and realization of Whatever Works helps account, no doubt, for its unusual and tricky tone. As their overdetermined names indicate, the characters are conceived as comic exaggerations: Boris the misanthrope, Melody the naïf and her mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), a faded rose right out of Tennessee Williams. But the actors don't play the scenes for laughs, exactly. That's particularly true of David, who makes Boris both monstrous and pathetic. He's Woody Allen's onscreen persona without the self-deprecating charm, an obsessive-compulsive who wakes up screaming with fear of his impending death. There's real fear in Boris, and fury, too. It's not surprising the role was written for Mostel, whose post-blacklist performances often seethe with barely suppressed rage.

Although it's shot in an elegant and understatedly realist style by the brilliant Harris Savides, it's not clear that we're ever meant to take the movie entirely at face value. Melody, for one, is thickheaded enough to suggest some undiagnosed form of brain damage. But Wood, almost unrecognizable without eyeliner and blood-red lips, commits to her character without self-consciousness — or self-awareness, for that matter, a trait in which all the movie's protagonists are notably lacking. At one point, Boris drops a reference to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the notion that observing an object inevitably changes its behavior, an observation that is pertinent both to love and to movies, especially one in which the central character addresses the audience directly.

Whatever Works is a romantic comedy in a Shakespearean mode. Love is a crazy, unpredictable thing, capable of bringing together a corn-fed cheerleader and a professional depressive, and of transforming a society wife into a bohemian libertine. But doubts linger after it's over. The resolution is what we observers demand, a necessity to help us face the outside world. Underneath it lie the darker feelings that have often poked through the skin of Allen's comedies, often more sharply than his sometimes ponderous dramas. In Whatever Works, they're particularly close to the surface, tingeing every laugh. It's a scream.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Whatever Works | Written and directed by Woody Allen | A Sony Pictures Classics release | Opens Friday at Ritz Five.