shoop and whatever works

"Profound" is a dangerous word. If you commit to believing that something or someone is profound, then someone else can turn on you with, "You think THAT's profound? What an intellectual and philosophical lightweight YOU are, then." I do the same thing myself--for example, if someone refers to, say, The Dark Knight as profound, I'm instantly making mock inside my head, if not out loud. But yesterday, I saw a profound movie. The fact that it's also a frequently funny and enormously entertaining movie makes the experience that much more pleasurable. The movie? Woody Allen's latest, Whatever Works.

The movie's backstory is well-documented--Allen wrote the script back in the 70s for Zero Mostel, with whom he'd worked on the Martin Ritt film The Front. Mostel's death put the project on hold until Allen decided to make a movie in New York quickly to avoid a possible actors' strike. For lovers of the Woody of the 70s like me, this project seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime gift--Woody returning to the Sleeper-Love and Death-Annie Hall-Manhattan (and sure, throw in Interiors, too) pool for a refreshing and invigorating (and final?) dip. The greatness of Whatever Works is that it delivers on that huge promise and then some.

It's Allen's "Tempest" and "It's a Wonderful Life"--with Larry David serving admirably as Boris Yelnikoff, the cracked Prospero who has created his own misanthropic island of despair, telling us in the audience directly (only Boris knows that we're watching--that's his magic) that really, it's a horrible, terrible life, but it's up to you to "filch" whatever happiness and wonder you can--whatever works. The genius (or the profound element) of the film is that we get to see simultaneously the wisdom of Boris' worldview, as well as the undeniable fact that Boris has created a good deal of his own misery himself.

There are signs of the younger Woody's more jokey sensibilities--Evan Rachel Wood's Melody plays off the hoariest southern nitwit stereotypes (including the notion that southerners don't get sarcasm), and her parents, played by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr., are painted just as broadly. Nevertheless, thanks largely due to the great, empathic performances by Wood, Clarkson, and Begley, Allen creates a world where these caricatures live, breathe, and even undergo their crazy about-faces in a believable way. They all have to, after all, figure out what works.

Fittingly, Boris, as Allen's most bluntly humanity-hating creation, gets the last word, and something of a happy ending--modified, of course, by the fact that nothing is going to stay happy for long. The fade-out is also, in a perverse paradox, Allen's warmest ending since Hannah and Her Sisters, as Boris tosses aside his magic staff not with a majestic incantation but with a wry, fatalistic shrug.

Is it horrible of me to wish that Whatever Works could be Woody's last film? Nevertheless, even if he putters around for another 5 or 10 years, he can't erase this--yes, profound--achievement.