Woody Allen’s latest has been out for a while in foreign parts, finally geeting a release here in blighty, but don’t panic -you haven’t been missing much.
So, Woody Allen. Let’s make this clear right now. He’s shit. There, it’s down on cyber-paper. I said it. feel free to add comments calling me an unintellectual pig who knows dick-all about filmmaking. I couldn’t give a crap, because you’re wrong and I’m right. Allen is a man who’d made a career out of one vaguely smirk-inducing moment in Sleeper. And that’s it.
Let’s make a Woody Allen movie together and see how Whatever Works stacks up shall we?
Step 1: Set it in New York.
Check. But not real, actual New York. Oh no. This is that familiar Allen parrallel universe where you can sit in Central Park at dusk and not get mugged, and buy a hotdog in the street and not die. An effect cleverly acheived by roping off miles of the city and not letting an actual New Yorker anywhere near the set. Woody’s NY is about as realistic as Mary Poppin’s London.
Step 2: Insert plot about Woody Allen using his oh-so-massive wit and intellect to ensnare a squaking younger girl -hey, she’s annoying but she’s got great tits! (unless she’s Diane Keaton obviously).
Whatever Works only scores a half point here because Wood’s just too damn decrepit these days. Instead we get Larry David, himself a man who’s in serious danger of outstaying his welcome. Sienfeld was often very funny, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is at least very clever, if not comedically appealing to all tastes, but the simple fact is that David has one default setting on-screen, and here he sticks to it like Lox on a bagel.
Depressed Physicist Boris Yelnikoff is solid Wood, panic attacks, nausea, nuerosis and failed suicide attempts -it’s all here. Actually, given the number of incompetant suiciders in Allen’s films, it’s a wonder the old git’s made it to old age, but unfortunately for us he has. If only something could cheer him up…what would do it….
Step 3: Insert slightly dim, bouncy girl some 30 years junior to our hero.
Yay! Evan Rachael Wood turns up and hey presto -Boris are happy. Instead of wandering moodily around a picaresque NY considering his place in a non-theistic universe, he wanders moodily around making occasional glib, self-deprecating remarks. The ganag’s all here. Aren’t they? wait…there need to be a few more issues…if only there was some way that the girl could bring…
Step 4:An annoying, issue-ridden family!
We got there in the end.
Yep, all we needed was to add in bubbly and slightly annoying Patricia Clarkson and worrisome and slightly annoying Ed Begley Jr, and we’re all set to watch them somehow make new lives and friends in NY’s mystical concrete canyons, finding the kind of connections that elude Boris for all his wit and angsty try-hard attitude.
What a crock of crap. Allen takes the same script he’s been unenthusiastically vomiting at us for the past 40 years, inserts David’s vaguely credible face in the hope of being somehow relevant and produces…exactly the same boring, unfunny, turgid mess of a film he’s always made.
Critics have lined up to suggest that Allen’s fire has gone out in the past few years, but frankly, I’m of the school that thinks he never had a spark to begin with – his original stand-up notwithstanding, the ability to pen funny lines for Bob Hope does not automatically confer genius status and the right to repeat yourself adnauseum for the better part of half a century.
A drippy, dippy, ill-planned mess, Whatever Works wastes some potentially stellar talent on a bad script that fails to amuse or educate and stock characters who fail to connect.
One Comment
I couldn’t agree more. I and a companion have been going to the Cornerhouse ‘art cinema’ nearly every week for nearly ten years and we have left halfway through plenty of Guardian 5 star rated films. This one though has set a record: we managed twenty minutes before concluding that it was cliched, badly acted and most of all very badly scripted crap.