Whatever Works barely operates

In theaters Friday: The Box, A Christmas Carol, The Fourth Kind, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Precious [limited]

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Food, Inc., G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, The Taking of Pelham 123, I Love You Beth Cooper

There was a point within the first 10 minutes of Woody Allen’s latest comedy Whatever Works (out now on DVD), when star Larry David, having left his friends at a sidewalk lunch table and begun speaking directly to the camera, that I realized the overindulgence of Allen’s script would be apparent for the next 90 minutes. “He’s still talking to the camera?” my wife said, looking up from her laptop. Yep, he was.

That’s not to say the monologue didn’t have its humorous moments, like the entire film that followed, but if dusting off an unused script from the 1970s was Allen’s idea for best returning to his Manhattan muse after making several films abroad, he might have reconsidered.

After throwing himself out of the window of the plush apartment he shares with his sniping wife, Boris not only survives, but divorces her and moves to Greenwich Village to live in solitude. I would call him whimsically suicidal if that wasn’t the most insensitive subgenre of the tragedy there was, but really Boris thinks much too highly of himself and his constantly-self-professed IQ to let a little self-loathing do him in. So what is it? It’s other people.

David, acting like his Curb Your Enthusiasm proxy is having the worst day of his life, portrays Boris, a lifelong New York intellectual so snide and unsympathetic that he spends his days constantly jeering at those he deems his intellectual inferiors. These include strangers on the street and the young children who are unfortunate enough to have him as their chess teacher.

Then, by infinitely random chance, as Boris muses (or by cheesy use of deus ex machina, I mused) Boris finds Melodie, a naďve teenage runaway who fled her parents in Mississippi for the bright lights of New York City, sleeping on the doorstep of his 3rd floor walk-up. Boris begrudgingly invites her up to his apartment for something to eat. That one act of reluctant kindness turns into weeks of odd-couple living for Boris and Melodie, who quickly adapts his sardonic and existential outlook on life on top of a beaming crush on him.

Now if Scarlet Johansson—surely overlooked for the role by accident, being that she’s Allen’s current muse after three pictures in 4 years—had brought a smidge of her sleepy-eyed, pouty-lipped adolescence played with such mystery and melancholy in Lost in Translation all those years ago, the role might not have been so one-dimensional. Instead we get Evan Rachel Wood as a Southern simpleton, the manifestation and culmination of Boris’ nightmares and his fantasies: conquering intellectually then sexually a lithe, blond and impressionable young red-stater who looks good in short shorts. We get it, Woody, she’s an idiot. But that doesn’t mean she has to be so predictable.

As it is, each move of hers along with those of her mother and father who soon turn up looking for her, is pretty much telegraphed as all of the major players lose happiness then find it in new ways. Worthy improvisers Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley keep things lively as Wood’s divorced parents—and both change dramatically even as David is static—but Michael McKean and Henry Cavill are underutilized in their small appearances.

The theme of finding happiness despite what your parents, your culture or even jaded, supercilious academics tell you life should be like, is an interesting, if somewhat dated one—I can imagine this film being much more revelatory when it was written 35 years ago—but if Allen remains stuck on his May-December dynamic, he might want to think about saying something new about it.