Whatever Works

At the end of last year the NPR radio program Fresh Air repeated an interview they did earlier in the year with Woody Allen. I was glad they did as I had missed it the first time around. The main question Terry Gross kept pounding away at was, "how are you different from the characters in your movies?" I thought this was a great question and I expected Allen to talk at length about how autobiographical his movies were, but I couldn't have been more wrong. He insisted he is not an intellectual and that instead, he is the guy sitting on his recliner watching the ball game in a t-shirt.

This story becomes a little harder to swallow after watching Whatever Works on On Demand. To me, Larry David is a louder, more cringe inspiring version of Woody Allen. In this film, David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a tortured intellectual who was once a well respected professor and scientist. More recently, he has divorced his rich wife, moved into a dump of an apartment and makes money teaching kids to play chess. To call him a conceited jerk would be an understatement. He is offensive to everyone he meets, including Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) a young Southern runaway that shows up on his doorstep. After he takes her in, the movie dives into the myth that everyone from the South is repressed and if they could all move to New York, their true selves will be revealed.

While I enjoyed this movie, I think the combination of Woody Allen and Larry David creates too much angst for one movie. It is ironic that David's character chastises his young charge, Melodie, for using cliches, when this movie is really one big (well played out) cliche.

Whatever Works now out on DVD and PPV.