On why New York makes you gay

A little bit late, but my Whatever Works review. My review for Moon should be up tomorrow:

Whatever Works would be an easy film to hate. After a hilarious opening fifteen minutes, much of the humour is lost. The characters come off as poorly conceived caricatures whose development ranges from absurd to borderline offensive. But this assumes these characters are to be taken at face value—highly specious considering the film begins with Larry David befuddling friends by interrupting a conversation to address the audience.

The story is basic Allen: David plays a former physicist retired into a life of elderly curmudgeonry. He meets Evan Rachel Wood, a dimwitted Southern girl who has run off to New York to escape her overbearing parents, and marries her despite his contempt for her limited intellect. The somewhat-happy arrangement is quickly complicated by the arrival of Wood’s estranged parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.), each a textbook case of sexual repression hidden behind an absurdly religious and well-to-do façade.

The characters are all farcical types, which can be off-putting since Allen’s so capable of giving us vibrant personalities. The Southern family may be a bunch of dimwitted hicks who abandon all sense of red-state virtue upon seeing the bright lights of New York City, but the New Yorkers themselves are pretentious hack philosophy professors and bloviating actors trying to live out some absurd romantic ideal. Each fits their mould equally well.

Of course a special place is reserved for the Allen-type, a role in which Larry David is wonderfully typecast. David manages to take his persona to such an extreme that he effectively strips away the ‘lovable’ from the ‘lovable Woody Allen misanthrope’. This might explain why the movie stops being so funny: David’s jerk antics become bizarrely cruel when he marries Wood only to continue belittling her and insulting her intellect.

Yet Whatever Works is a feel good movie, despite David’s emphatic claims to the contrary. And this slippage is easy to explain: none of these characters is particularly real. The whole film is set up as a tableside story, but Allen takes it one step further, having David acknowledge it as a movie.

David claims that he alone can see the ‘whole picture’, complaining that he is ‘surrounded by microbes’ with myopic worldviews, who are unable to see that the universe is flying apart, and that all will inevitably come to nothingness. It is telling that the cosmic musings of a precocious child in Annie Hall are transposed here to a self-described “Nobel level” physicist. The New York crowd takes seriously David’s ‘theory’ that ‘life is meaningless,’ treating it like something novel, as if the problem of nihilism is new. David causes the devout Southerners to question their entire belief system by merely informing them that God does not exist, as if the poor, ignorant religious folks had never before pondered such a possibility. He continually refers to himself as a genius while berating others, yet he never really offers anything profound. In fact, he’s outright trite.

Really, if Woody Allen was serious with half of this, the movie would be terrible. But, as is often the case, he isn’t. Sure, he’s honestly trying to work something out, but it’s all filtered through several layers of self-effacing awareness. David’s misanthrope is the ultimate caricature, and every bit the ridiculous ‘type’ Allen portrays the Southerners to be. David’s misanthropy and worldview are mundane, and though he constantly chastises Wood for speaking in clichés, he is one.

Ultimately the use of clichéd characters helps Allen isolate something they hold in common. Certain neuroses led Begley to his love of the NRA, or Clarkson to sticking her young daughter in degrading beauty pageants, just like certain neuroses drive David to being a misanthropic asshole. And really it’s all the same. Allen addresses the audience through his lead actor, yet never quite expresses exactly what David is saying. He’s just letting us in on the joke, letting us know that it’s all bullshit, as most pretences are, and really that none of us are all that different, no matter what roles, personas, identities or type characters have been attached to us. We’re all just people trying to carve out whatever we can in an otherwise senseless existence. Next to that our differences are just sort of trivial and insignificant.

Which is cliché, of course. But as Wood says in a scene where she manages to get the better of David: “if the shoe fits, wear it.”