Whatever Works
An odd thing happened at the showing of Whatever Works on Thursday night. Whenever there was a throwaway funny line (not very often, as it happens, this movie really bombards you with the flashing two-tone “LAUGHTER!!” signs whenever it comes up with something amusing) hilarity exploded in random spots in the audience before rippling off to either side, those who’d heard and understood the joke relating it to those who hadn’t. Not that the humour was especially sophisticated – the biggest laugh of the evening was reserved for the old reaction shot of someone fainting – nor was the dialogue hard to follow; it was just that, with a few honourable exceptions, the seats were stuffed entirely with pensioners, the hard of hearing and scant of attention, riffling their mint imperials as they murmur at badness in thrilled disapproval. Woody Allen, ladies and gentlemen, has grown old, and so has his audience.
Well, Woody was always old, I suppose, and so were his best audiences, but he was never this out of touch. The stilted, arch and sonorous platitudes of Match Point. Cassandra’s Dream, so unrecognisably the London underworld that it might as well have been Caracas, or the Matrix, or a scene from a new Fantasia. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, reheated French farce made dangerous by sex. And before that, well, before that people were saying he’d lost his way! Fancy that. Poor Woody. Lost in an England of his own devising.
At any event, he’s turned up again clutching his tiny suitcase in Grand Central, dug out an old script from the Seventies, and made a film which does not change the world but at least adds to it. A fantasy of wish-fulfillment, yes, but one that at least has the grace to admit that for most people who look or act like Woody Allen, fantasies are all they’re gonna get. Self-serving? Of course, but everybody’s worldview is; that’s what worldviews are for; to explain why we do the things we do. Larry David’s good, he can be a jerk in just the sort of brusque and dysfunctional way that keeps him on the right side of likable; Allen playing the same material would have been snide and whiny. Oh, and some of it doesn’t quite come off, but seeing as how the whole film is a paean to the grand and noble tradition of making whatcha can out of whatcha got, it seems churlish to say so. Out of an aging script, unpromising plot, no-name actors and a stand-up comedian, Woody Allen cobbles together something that’s more than functional. Whatever Works works.