Good Enough for Me
by Mark Asch
Directed by Woody Allen
Why is Woody Allen's dialogue so bad? Reviewing Cassandra's Dream in these pages, Michael Joshua Rowin pinpointed how "moral themes and usually self-explanatory elements like character traits [are] spelled out for the audience." A theory: The Woodman films his rough drafts. This allows him to maintain his one-a-year pace — and work with various belles du jour — while still playing clarinet at the Carlyle every Monday night and rewatching the old Fred Astaire movies that, in Whatever Works, like the Marx Brothers in Hannah and Her Sisters, make life worth ending later rather than sooner.
The character sketches and thematic outlines themselves remain springy, though expect tut-tutting at Whatever Works' thirty-years-creepier-than-Manhattan mentor/lover relationship, between stand-in schlemiel Borris (Larry David) and Southern-fried runaway Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood). The movie is half self-justification, half apology, as David's misanthrope physicist — his habit of referring to himself as "Nobel-nominated" gets at the arrogance not entirely obscured by self-parody — is so cowed by Melodie's naïve sexuality (and preteen sleepover wardrobe) that he inadvertently (honestly!) snows her into a state of awe and nursemaidenhood.
What really doesn't work, though, is the leftover dinner-party banter — especially the insular, smugly angry typing of red-state mores — with which Allen establishes David's crank credentials. (A bit of the writer's well-read absurdism, and Catskills emcee persistence, differentiate from David's Curb Your Enthusiasm grouch.) Well, that, and the direct-address summations lifted from Annie Hall, minus their cloak of metaphor, and the uneven performances permitted the normally laser-focused Patricia Clarkson and easygoing Ed Begley, Jr. Yup: Whatever Works is a movie made by somebody with dinner reservations.
Opens June 19
