Whatever Works (2009)
Film Overview
A misanthropic New York intellectual convinced that humanity is hopeless finds his carefully defended solitude disrupted by an optimistic young runaway from Mississippi who refuses to see the world as bleakly as he does.
Larry David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a brilliant but deeply pessimistic former physicist who has abandoned his previous life and now spends much of his time lecturing friends, strangers and the audience about human stupidity.
Evan Rachel Wood plays Melody St. Ann Celestine, a young woman from Mississippi who arrives in New York with almost none of Boris’s education and none of his certainty that civilisation is doomed.
Boris reluctantly allows Melody to stay in his apartment. Their apparently impossible friendship develops into an equally unlikely marriage, forcing both characters to adapt to a relationship neither could have predicted.
Patricia Clarkson plays Melody’s mother Marietta, who comes to New York determined to rescue her daughter and instead undergoes a dramatic transformation of her own. Ed Begley Jr. later appears as Melody’s conservative father John, whose arrival produces another unexpected change.
The film marked Allen’s return to New York after four consecutive features made in Europe. Harris Savides photographs the East Village, Chinatown and familiar Manhattan streets, while Larry David gives Boris a comic rhythm distinctly his own rather than simply reproducing Allen’s screen persona.
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My Review
A pessimist discovers life refuses to follow his calculations
Whatever Works begins with Boris Yellnikoff explaining why almost everybody is an idiot and spends the rest of the film demonstrating that being intellectually convinced life is absurd does not make you any better at predicting what will happen next.
Larry David is ideal casting because Boris’s irritation feels different from Woody Allen’s familiar nervousness. Allen’s screen characters often worry that something terrible might happen. Boris generally assumes the terrible thing has already happened and is called humanity.
He regards intelligence almost as a curse that forces him to recognise the stupidity everybody else has been lucky enough not to notice.
Then Melody arrives and begins disproving his certainty simply by being happy.
Boris believes intelligence has allowed him to understand life. Melody keeps demonstrating that understanding life and enjoying it may be completely different skills.
Evan Rachel Wood plays Melody without making innocence the same thing as emptiness. She knows very little about the cultural and intellectual world Boris values, but she possesses an openness he has almost completely lost.
At first Boris treats her as another example of everything wrong with the species. She misunderstands references, accepts ideas too easily and does not recognise when he is insulting her.
Yet Melody’s lack of sophistication makes her strangely resistant to his pessimism. She simply does not have the intellectual machinery required to turn every disappointment into proof that existence is meaningless.
Boris finds this infuriating until he also begins finding it comforting.
Their marriage is deliberately improbable, and the title provides the film’s defence. If two people find something that works for them, conventional logic may not be particularly useful.
Boris is considerably older, intellectually domineering and emotionally damaged. Melody is young, inexperienced and still forming an adult identity. The relationship is never presented as an ideal model.
Instead, it is one temporary arrangement in a film where almost every character eventually discovers that the life they were taught to want may not be the life that suits them.
“Whatever works” is less romantic philosophy than practical surrender.
The film does not claim Boris and Melody make sense together. Its entire point is that sense has been overrated.
Patricia Clarkson gives the film its funniest transformation. Marietta arrives from Mississippi horrified by the life her daughter has chosen and determined to restore the moral order she believes New York has damaged.
Then New York gets to work on Marietta.
She discovers photography, artistic circles and a version of herself that had apparently been waiting underneath years of religious and social certainty.
Clarkson makes the change broad but surprisingly believable. Liberation does not appear because somebody lectures Marietta into changing her beliefs. It appears because she encounters circumstances in which another life suddenly feels possible.
Marietta arrives in Manhattan to rescue Melody from New York and ends up needing New York to rescue Marietta.
Ed Begley Jr.’s John repeats the joke from another direction. He arrives with his own fixed assumptions about marriage, religion and the life he believes he has lost.
New York again produces an outcome completely different from the one anybody expected.
That repetition is important because Boris has spent the film claiming human behaviour is predictable in its stupidity. Yet people keep surprising themselves.
Even characters who begin inside rigid identities discover possibilities they had not previously allowed themselves to imagine.
Boris’s direct address to the audience is one of the film’s cleverest devices. He knows we are watching.
Nobody else can see us, which makes his awareness another piece of evidence in his conviction that he perceives reality more clearly than ordinary people.
It also allows Allen to turn Boris into commentator and character simultaneously. He can explain the absurdity of everybody’s behaviour while remaining spectacularly unable to recognise how absurd he is himself.
The audience therefore becomes the one group Boris assumes might finally be intelligent enough to understand him.
Boris can see the audience. Naturally he interprets this supernatural ability as further evidence that he is the smartest person in the room.
It is also a pleasure to be back in New York. After London and Barcelona, the East Village immediately feels like a return to familiar Allen territory.
Boris’s apartment, neighbourhood cafés, Chinatown and downtown streets give the film a smaller scale than the affluent environments of the European films.
Grant’s Tomb becomes a particularly Boris location: a monument to death visited by a man who never misses an opportunity to remind somebody that mortality is the central fact of existence.
Harris Savides gives the city a natural, lived-in quality rather than the romantic polish of some earlier Allen New York films.
The soundtrack is wonderfully mixed. Groucho Marx singing Hello, I Must Be Going is a perfect introduction to Boris’s hostility towards social obligation.
Beethoven appears beside Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, Red Garland and Jackie Gleason.
Desafinado brings relaxed bossa nova into a film where Boris rarely seems relaxed about anything, while Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year sounds almost like a description of a man whose emotional life has arrived several decades behind schedule.
The music is much warmer than Boris’s philosophy.
Boris insists the universe is cold and indifferent while the soundtrack keeps quietly supplying better company.
The final rearrangement of the relationships is appropriately chaotic. Melody finds Randy, Boris loses the marriage he never expected to have and other characters settle into lives nobody could have predicted at the beginning.
Boris’s philosophy does not exactly change. He remains Boris.
What changes is the qualification. Whatever happiness can be found should probably be accepted rather than rejected because it fails some theoretical test of permanence or logic.
That is a surprisingly generous conclusion from one of Allen’s most aggressively pessimistic protagonists.
Boris never decides life makes sense. He merely accepts that nonsense can occasionally be pleasant enough to keep.
I like Whatever Works largely because Larry David prevents it from feeling like a simple replay of an earlier Allen comedy.
The script itself originated decades earlier, but David’s rhythms make Boris feel unmistakably his own creation.
Wood is charming without becoming merely naïve, Clarkson almost steals the film, and the return to Manhattan gives the material the slightly scruffy energy it needs.
The philosophy may be modest, but that is the point: permanent answers are unlikely, so take the happiness available before Boris has time to explain why it cannot possibly last.
Cast and Characters
Larry David
A brilliant, misanthropic former physicist convinced that his intelligence allows him to see the stupidity and futility everyone else misses.
Evan Rachel Wood
An optimistic young runaway from Mississippi whose arrival completely disrupts Boris’s carefully defended isolation.
Patricia Clarkson
Melody’s initially conservative mother, whose attempt to retrieve her daughter produces an unexpected transformation of her own.
Ed Begley Jr.
Melody’s father, whose journey to New York ultimately challenges his identity as profoundly as Marietta’s.
Henry Cavill
A young British actor whose arrival gives Melody the possibility of a relationship far closer to the life she might naturally build for herself.
Michael McKean
One of Boris’s friends and a member of the small audience forced to listen to his relentless analysis of humanity.
Groucho Marx opens a soundtrack considerably more cheerful than Boris
Comedy songs, Beethoven, jazz and bossa nova surround a protagonist who regards almost every form of happiness with suspicion.
Hello, I Must Be Going
Groucho Marx and the cast of Animal Crackers provide an ideal musical introduction to Boris: a song built around the desire to leave almost as soon as social contact has begun.
A warm musical world around a very cold philosophy
Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies appear beside Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd, Red Garland and Jackie Gleason.
The eclectic soundtrack mirrors a film in which people from apparently incompatible worlds repeatedly discover arrangements that somehow function.
Symphony No. 9
The great symphony supplies a scale and grandeur amusingly at odds with Boris’s daily complaints about the worthlessness of humanity.
Desafinado
The relaxed bossa nova standard brings an ease to the soundtrack that Boris himself rarely achieves.
Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year
A beautifully appropriate title for a film about people discovering new lives considerably later than expected.
If I Could Be With You
The older romantic standard supplies a tenderness Boris would probably dismiss if he were not occasionally living it himself.
Locations
After four consecutive films made in Europe, Allen returns to a smaller, downtown New York of East Village streets, cafés, Chinatown and familiar public spaces.
East Village
Boris’s neighbourhood gives the film a distinctly downtown identity very different from the affluent London and Barcelona worlds immediately preceding it.
Grant’s Tomb
Boris takes Melody to the monument, an appropriately mortality-focused outing for a man who rarely allows anyone to forget death exists.
Chinatown
Chinatown forms part of Boris’s less polished, more everyday New York geography.
Café Vivaldi
The former Jones Street café appears among the neighbourhood locations used during the Manhattan production.
Kaufman Astoria Studios
Allen again used the Queens studio complex that had served as a production base for many earlier films.
Home Again
The city’s return after four European features gives the film an intentionally familiar Allen geography even while Larry David supplies a completely different central voice.
Awards and Recognition
Opening Night Film
The world premiere of Whatever Works opened the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.
Allen Returns Home
The production marked Allen’s return to shooting in New York after four consecutive films made in Europe.
Written Decades Earlier
Allen originally developed the screenplay in the 1970s with Zero Mostel in mind for the Boris role before the project was shelved.
A New Comic Voice
David brings his own rhythms to a role that might otherwise have resembled an older variation on Allen’s familiar screen persona.
Harris Savides
The acclaimed cinematographer gives the return to Manhattan a natural and comparatively understated visual texture.
Whatever Works
The film’s title becomes its philosophy: happiness does not need to be permanent, conventional or theoretically convincing to be worth accepting.