Whatever Works (Blu-ray)

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The tagline on this film should be "Woody Allen does Larry David," because it feels as if Allen took David's crusty, socially misfit cameo character from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and gave him an extended episode. The trouble--for me, at least--is that David's character is so acerbic that small doses seem best. And Allen pushes that curmudgeonly character just a little too far for my taste.

In "Curb Your Enthusiasm" it was life's small annoyances that drove Larry David crazy--like the way pants pop up around the zipper when you sit down, the polite-but-boring ritual of small talk, or the singing of the Happy Birthday song. Watching him almost burst a blood vessel over daily minutiae is part of the fun. If he were fuming over the troop level in Afghanistan or global warming, his rants would have fallen flat. Same with the situations in which he found himself. Asked to guard a lock-less unisex bathroom door for his wife, Larry gets distracted and someone walks in on her. Asked his honest opinion of how a dress looks, Larry makes the mistake of being totally (and brutally) honest. There are consequences to be paid, but because a small thing sets the dominos to falling, everything remains relatively inconsequential. In "Curb Your Enthusiasm" his character speaks his mind and goes off on tangents, but it's always the small things that set him off and snowball into big, embarrassing situations. It's fun to watch him get his come-uppance, and it's fun to watch him protest the things that the rest of us suffer through in polite silence. He's the Everyman some of us wish we could be, or the odd uncle in everyone's family who stirs things up without hardly trying.

But in "Whatever Works," Allen takes that cantankerous Larry David character who's simply annoyed by so the little things in life and turns him into a nihilistic pessimist who thinks that all humanity is dumb as a plant. "On the whole," he says, directly addressing the audience, "we're a failed species." In the no-kidding category he warns, "This is not the feel-good movie of the year. If you're one of those idiots who needs to feel good, go get yourself a foot massage." He rails against the "family value morons" and the "gun morons" and gripes about being considered for--but not winning--the Nobel Prize in physics. The irony is that after this tired attempt to be post-modernly self-referential, Allen lapses into feel-good mode for an overly facile third act. In the meantime, what we get are a succession of tirades and vignettes of the main character's life, such as it is.

Boris Yellnikoff (David) may be an expert in quantum mechanics, but he's clueless when it comes to everyday life and life's social graces. No longer a professor, he makes money to supplement his retirement by teaching chess to children, and the scenes in which he plays with the youngsters are among the film's funniest, and, because excessive repetition makes the gag wear thin, also some of the film's most pathetic. "Your son's an imbecile," he shouts at one parent. "You should teach him tiddly winks, not chess." And to Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a homeless runaway who turns up in the alley near the back stairs leading to his apartment, he declares, "You're a brainless little twit who won't last three days in New York." With a steady stream of insults like this, I'm thinking, Who wrote the screenplay? Don Rickles?. But no, it was Woody Allen, who also directs.

I knew the screenplay didn't come from a woman, because the likelihood of an under-21 farm girl falling for an abusive, suicidal man old enough to be her grandfather reflects the world as a man old enough to be Evan Rachel Wood's grandfather sees it . . . or wishes it to be, at least, in the realm of possibility. Even if you consider Boris and his verbally abusive, controlling ways enough to qualify for the Stockholm Syndrome effect, there still isn't enough scenic evidence to make us believe that she would be "into" him, though we do get to see his gradual, believable feelings for her.