Whatever Works

Spoiler alert. All my film articles need spoiler alerts. If you haven’t seen this film and spoilers piss you off, then don’t read on. I’m not very sparing that way.

Woody Allen’s Intimations of Mortality

Seeing that I made a comment about Ridley Scott in his decline phase as being not as good as Woody Allen’s I thought it might be an idea to check in with the auteur of angst comedy to see where he has landed.

This one took me a little by surprise. Woody Allen’s always talked about death and his immense fear of dying, but this film is the first time I actually felt this fear was not a neurosis but actually a real problematic for Allen. He’s getting old, he has to think about the inevitability of his own demise; and while he probably doesn’t care too deeply about his own legacy, we get the feeling that the reason he doesn't want to die is because there is so much in life he actually loves and wishes not to leave behind. Paramount in all of life for Allen, is love itself.

What’s Good About It

The rapier wit and cutting remarks are alive and well in Woody Allen’s world. This film is filled with misanthropic classic one liners and putdowns. The sarcasm is priceless and casting Larry David to play the older man pays off in bundles. For once we are freed from the lines being delivered by the Woody Allen persona that he has built up over 40-odd movies, and instead having them delivered by somebody who has been playing misanthropic monsters with panache.

The set up follows on from some of his other films where an older man takes up with a younger woman, but in this film Woody Allen makes no bones about the fact that we should be uncomfortable with it, even if it is something that the people in the story come to accept rather readily.

In fact, the characters in the story come to accept all manners of things about themselves that you would not expect them to accept. Through out the various moments of transformation that befall the characters, we get a glimpse into what a truly recklessly liberal mind can think up. On some level it reminds us of the kind of social critiques mounted by the Marquis de Sade, but without the sexual violence. Woody Allen sees our sexual mores as largely circumstantial, like coin-tosses by God (except he's not there). It’s a radically mean thing to say, but it’s very much worth saying.

What’s Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen has written and directed too many films and is easily bored, but lately he doesn’t seem to be interested in proper plotting. He knows what he’s interested in, so he goes headlong into playing out those scenes, but the narrative in this film is so loose and haphazard, it makes you wonder if he cares about the conventions of drama any more.

The story is ostensibly a narrative told by Boris Yellnikoff, and yet there are whole swags of the story that should be unknowable, even to a genius. Then, when the story gets a little complicated, Yellnikoff simply narrates away the structure of the problem. The problem with this is that it then becomes exposition and the exposition is a lot less interesting than seeing.

It’s easy to see that Woody Allen’s chewed off more than he can handle with this story. There’s the story of the girl from Mississippi who comes to New York and ends up marrying an older guy; but there’s also the story of her mother who comes to New York and experiences a sexual awakening; followed by the girl’s father who comes to New York and shakes off his repression to come out. They’re all fairly big stories, but Woody Allen isn’t interested in the emotional arcs, he’s interested in the weirdness of these stories, so he cherry picks the weird bits and narrates his way over what really needs to be dramatised.

The end result is a film that hangs together on Boris Yellnikoff’s description, and while the descriptions are funny, the film might have been funnier if Allen had bothered to dramatise those moments too.

What’s Interesting About It

This film comes exactly 30 years after Woody Allen’s classic ‘Manhattan’. ‘Manhattan’ of course is a story about a 40-something guy who comes to terms with his own feelings for a 17 year old girl. This film is arguably about Woody Allen finding a way to finish that thought to its natural conclusion. ‘Manhattan’ is touched by a deeply romantic view about love and relationships and interpersonal ethics beyond conventional morality, it ultimately rests on the bittersweet hope that Woody Allen’s character Isaac Davies can keep being the man for Tracy, the 17 year old played by Mariel Hemmingway. The sentiment is dripping at the end of the film.

By contrast, ‘Whatever Works’ is remarkably anti-humanist and anti-sentimental. In the intervening 30 years, Woody Allen seems to have lost the taste for pleasing people with the fairytale ending. He knows that audiences won’t buy the fairytale ending coming from him any more. Instead he lets slip his misanthropy and turns that into a circus of bad behaviour that all gets celebrated.

You could do worse than to watch these 2 films back to back, just to observe just how much Woody Allen has given up, so to speak.

The Young Women

There's a long string of really interesting young women in Woody Allen's film starting at Mariel Hemmingway, that goes through barbara Herschey's character in 'Hannah and Her Sisters' and then Mira Sorvino in 'Mighty Aphrodite', and Scarlet Johannson in 'Scoop', and finally to Evan Rachel Wood in 'Whatever Works'.

It is as if these young women not only play the object of desire as well as the yearning for lost youth, but foils for the nasty things Woody Allen has to say about American womanhood - things that a proper feminist would say are misogynist but are so damn funny when you see them on the screen. Keep in mind Mira Sorvino won her Oscar on the back of her performance as porn star and hooker Linda Ash in 'Mighty Aphrodite'.

In each outing where he has these young women in his stories, he has become increasingly hostile as well as downright insulting. The Melody character played by Evan Rachel Wood in 'Whatever Works' is almost unforgivably stupid if not but her vast capacity to absorb the patter of Larry David's character. It's comic, but also deeply accepting of Boris' foibles. Woody Allen's persona-character is always lecturing and hectoring these characters to become better read, better educated and more savvy, but these women always find some side door out of these character projects. You sort of wonder if Woody Allen goes through his own life running this kind of enlightenment project on all the young actresses with whom he works.

The Enlightenment

That being said, one of the thing that sets Woody Allen apart from all the other film makers is that he is interested in the enlightenment. He wants people to be better informed, more tolerant, more accepting and widely read if not simply, wiser. I don't think Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg or David Mamet have such concerns in their films. Other film makers perhaps are after the sublime experience, but Woody Allen is more interested in analysing what a sublime experience might be.

It reminds one of the old joke that there are two doors; One says it goes to heaven. The other says it's a door to understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the existence of heaven. There is a queue of Germans, lined up at the second door. One imagines Woody Allen is at the end of the line, hoping to catch a glimpse of God - not that he wants to believe in him at all because it would entail to much guilt and superstitious activity.

If there is one single thing that Woody Allen has got going for his films is his belief in the Enlightenment. It is why even in his decline phase his films actually have a topical intensity. This is something special because it's not like you see Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe championing the enlightenment, those guys want to talk about freedom from tyranny and oppression. It's a nice cause but everybody believes in those. Who really believes in the Enlightenment enough to go to bat for it over and over again? Woody Allen sure does.

The George Costaza Loop

In early episodes of 'Seinfeld' there were moments where George Costanza played by Jason Alexander might have been a light re-run of the Woody Allen New Yorker persona. This quickly showed itself to be otherwise as George indulged in more and more despicable and deplorable schemes in that show. They were funny but also darkly nihilistic. It seemed George was in fact a totally different kind of animal to the Woody Allen persona, except Woody Allen went through a transformative period where he split up with Mia Farrow and took up with Soon-Yi Previn and the whole facade of the Woody Allen Persona's moral dimension was ditched.

In the 1990s, Woody Allen went on to make some hilariously self-deprecating, almost masochistic films - all the while denying he was writing about himself - an with each outing the Woody Allen persona would become more despicable, more deplorable. It was running parallel to George Costanza. The pinnacle of these films was 'Deconstructing Harry' where he dismantled any moral high ground from his Woody Allen persona, in exchange for some really barbed wit insight about how society deludes itself into thinking it is so moral. Harry was every bit as destructive as George Costanza.

What's really interesting in 'Whatever Works' is how Larry David who inspired the George Costanza personality becomes the mouthpiece for the post-Soon-Yi scandal Woody Allen, we have a character of such monstrous misanthropy and contempt, it's shocking and abrasve. Not only is what he is saying disturbingly nihilistic and brazenly contemptuous, the manner in which he says it is equally sardonic and dismissive. It's quite a combination.

Going Out Of The Window

Woody Allen has been working with the motif of somebody leaping out the window to commit suicide for some time now. 'Melinda and Melinda' is centered around it; In 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion', Betty Ann Fitzgerald played by Helen Hunt attempts such a suicide; in 'Crimes and Misdemeanors', it is how the philosopher chooses to go out; and so does Boris, only to physically land on his next love.

Woody Allen must live with temptation a lot because his other references to suicide methods are scattered, but he consistently comes back to leaping out of windows. It might be some trope that he keeps coming back to but he has also staged this moment in one way or another, quite number of times now so it seems it is more than some recurring leit motif in his work. It's probably more like a distilled essence of his thoughts on suicide.The power of sublimation of course is that he keeps making movies instead and claiming his on-screen persona has very little to do with him in real life. He's got it really good.