Misanthropic Thunder

One of my big problems with Woody Allen’s 2004 film Melinda and Melinda was the way it cheated on its premise. That premise, you’ll recall, involved an intellectual argument between two writers over whether life was inherently comic or tragic; the film then purported to test their competing theories by telling the same story twice, once as a comedy, and once as a tragedy.

Except what Allen actually does is to tell two quite different stories that begin with the same situation but whose plots then go off in wildly diverging directions. It seemed to me that if Allen really wanted to be true to his premise, the two stories should have hit the exact same plot points, playing them for laughs and then playing them for drama.

Of course, the film I’m proposing probably would be incredibly tedious, but it struck me as I watched Allen new comedy Whatever Works that it would have paired up nicely in a Melinda and Melinda-style screenplay as a comic counterpoint to the Sydney Pollack subplot from Husbands and Wives. Both stories involve older men who leave their wives and take up with much younger women who are clearly their intellectual inferior — Pollack starts dating an aerobics instructor played by Lysette Anthony, while in Whatever Works, Larry David plays a curmudgeonly physicist who winds up in a relationship with a young Southern runaway named Melody Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood). In Husbands and Wives, the relationship has its sexual rewards for Pollack, but soon he tires of his new lover, and in a memorably ugly scene, he comes close to beating her up for embarrassing him in front of his intellectual friends. In Whatever Works, David’s romance with Wood also has a short shelf life, but nobody gets hurt and everyone (including Wood’s parents) comes out of it a better, happier person.

The problem with this whole theory is that Whatever Works stops being funny after about half an hour. Allen gives David a great opening scene, a long, misanthropic monologue that he delivers straight to the camera while his friends and passers-by on the sidewalk, who can’t see the audience like he can, look at him like he’s lost his mind. Meanwhile, David’s naturally aggressive line delivery gives Allen’s somewhat musty routines about hypochondria and how the entire world hates the Jews a much-needed shot of energy. But then a strange paradox creeps in: David’s character makes a living teaching chess to schoolkids, and while it’s hilarious to see him screaming at little children and calling them idiots, every time he calls Wood a microbe or an inchworm or a “submental baton-twirler,” you just feel terrible inside. You keep expecting Wood to stand up for herself at some point, but all of David’s abuse apparently just bounces off her. Wood is quite sweet in this role, but there’s a nastiness to the movie’s central relationship that kills your good mood, even though Allen apparently thinks it's charming.

Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr. both turn up later in the movie as Wood’s parents, red-state conservatives whose time in New York and in David’s company transforms them into sexually liberated bohemians. It’s not a bad joke — it’s a little reminiscent of the illegal Mexican workers in the background of Steve Martin's Bowfinger who by the end of the movie have gradually turned into Variety-reading Hollywood players — but it’s not really dramatized. It’s more like the outline of a funny idea, as if Allen didn’t really feel the need to show us the situation actually playing out when he could just give us a general idea of it.

I’ve stuck with Woody Allen through thick and thin, even that horrible patch of comedies that began in 2001 with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, straight on through Scoop in 2006. Whatever Works is his best comedy in a decade, but it’s still a creaky, sour little movie that’s far from a return to his Annie Hall salad days. Granted, the man is 73 years old, but I’d like to think he still has another Purple Rose of Cairo or Hannah and Her Sisters left in him. Can he see out into the audience the way Larry David can? If so, I hope he can tell we’re all rooting for him.