Whatever Works (2009)

This 2020 Woody Allen movie was in fact made in 2009. But it feels so 2020. 

To wit: hero Boris sings himself Happy Birthday twice while washing his hands. Speaking of pandemic toxicity, in a wax museum Boris tells Melody she needs to marry a moronic redneck like the Donald Trump dummy behind them. 

The Woody role is taken by — or dissolves into — the more current and heavyweight rage of the Larry David persona. As if his misanthropy were not repulsive enough,  Boris bullies, berates and takes money from the children he humiliates at chess. David supplants the Woody timidity with unrestrained aggressiveness. 

Consistent with his Blue Jasmine and other homages to A Streetcar Named Desire, Melody’s southern belle mother Marietta blows in like Blanche de Bois, disdainful of her sister’s flat, life and husband. She even repeats a line: “You are not the gentleman I was expecting.”

Enhancing all that currency is the film’s self-referentiality. Boris speaks to the audience directly, going even further than the breakthru frisson of Alvy’s address in Annie Hall. 

His brilliant quantum mechanics character “sees the big picture.” He alone knows he is a character in a big picture — this film — and that we’re the hapless doomed schnooks trapped on the witness side of his experience. The device encapsulates both Allen’s existentialism and his commitment to full frontal exposure of human frailty and hopelessness. But so too his emblazoned prescription: Do Whatever Works. 

By that principle the characters Boris has persistently presented as doomed cretins blossom into happiness, however cosmically brief and comically doomed, in the concluding renewal, at the New Years Eve party (despite Boris’s hatred of the institution). Melody has her actor stud. Erstwhile church lady Marietta is rapturously fulfilled as an erotic art photographer living with two men. Melody’s frustrated dad finds fulfilment in a homosexual relationship. And having fled his first, ideal marriage and been released from the perfect, inappropriate second one, Boris falls for a psychic  — who should have sensed her imminent catastrophe. And perhaps did.

This has to be ranked among Allen’s best. Its conception is brave and brilliant. It has one of wittiest, most crackling and quotable scripts. The casting, performances, sets, editing, everything smacks of the master’s hand. Except for all his other masterpieces this would be Woody’s best. Everything works.