Whatever Works

Whatever Works is Woody Allen’s first New York movie after five years abroad. It’s his first in even longer to center on the Woody Allen character — an urban neurotic, here named Boris Yellnikoff and brashly played by Larry David. Toughened and (relatively) rejuvenated by David’s aggressive performance, the Allen surrogate is introduced treating his friends to a lecture on the “God racket.” Nothing especially new — Allen wrote this script 30 years ago and intended it for no less a force of nature than Zero Mostel. Nastier than David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Boris is a cousin to insult comedian Don Rickles — smug, self-absorbed and argumentative with an unshakable faith in his listeners’ stupidity and his own “huge worldview.” Whatever Works shifts into gear when Boris finds a teenage runaway named Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) camped out in front of his shabby downtown digs and grudgingly takes her in. Of course, Melodie is a cheerful, optimistic, winsome Mississippi belle. They “date” (he takes her to Grant’s Tomb and Yonah Schimmel’s knishery) and they marry. Melodie’s parents — white-bread, Jesus-praising “aborigines,” as their son-in-law characterizes them — arrive in New York, and the movie dons its jammies and goes to sleep. Whatever Works illustrates, even as it names, Allen’s artistic limitations.