Thursday
02Jul2009
Movie Review - 'Whatever Works'
Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 11:56PM | Whatever Works
Starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, and Patricia
Clarkson  |
Everyone has a boss or an uncle that revels in telling the same story over and over
again. It was really funny the first time you heard it, and it was fine to hear it again when the boss or
uncle told it to somebody else. You even tolerated it when he told the same story twice in one day, just because somebody new walked into the room and an uncomfortable silence was in the air.But now it’s the eighth time that story somehow squeezed its way into a
conversation, and you know every twist and the punchline word for word.
If you’ve never seen a Woody Allen comedy, Whatever Works is pretty funny. But if you’ve navigated
your way to this point through Annie Hall and Manhattan or even his less stellar 1990s
period including Everyone Says I Love You and Deconstructing Harry, you have heard Allen or
his on-screen surrogates discuss relationships, religion, society, and the opposite sex in pretty much the
same way every time. For you, Whatever Works probably won’t work.
In his latest film, Allen hitches his specific and unaltered worldview to Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David),
a physicist who was once "considered" for the Nobel Prize. Neuroses got the better of him, and soon after
hitting his professional zenith, Boris fell off dramatically, symbolized by his attempted suicide, a
running jump out of his penthouse window that ended on the canopy below.
Now instead of leaving the world he can't abide, Boris walks through it with a limp. He is simply
overwhelmed by society and the “cretins” in it. His best rants about the idiocy that he faces on a daily
basis involve calling people he thinks are beneath him inchworms or earthworms. We hear one or the other
about every three minutes.
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