Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is house-sitting for his brother Phillip (Chris Messina), after being treated for a nervous breakdown.  Rather than pushing himself to do something worthwhile, he leads his own personal crusade against initiative.  Somehow all of his whining catches the eye of his brother’s drugged out P.A., Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig).  Roger re-unites with an old friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), and their interactions are wholly uninteresting.  As Roger and Florence bring Phillip’s dog to the vet and back, they form a bond out of their shared low standards and sexual frustration.  They fight and get back together, then the movie ends.  There are a couple of missed moments and shallow tangents, but at heart, nothing happens.

The few highlights of the movie were slight jokes that, albeit hysterical, would have been equally hysterical within any story.  One such line was used to describe an old fling: “If you worked with her in an office you’d have a crush on her, but outside of that you’d start to wonder if she really was as cute as you’d thought.” While this is a slightly insightful comment about office crushes, its inclusion in this particular movie feels rather arbitrary. The best jokes in Baumbach’s masterpiece, The Squid and the Whale, were equally rib-tickling, but actually served a purpose within the story (i.e. the left-handed desk).

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor, awaiting tenure at a Midwestern college in the late nineteen sixties, is having a bit of an existential crisis. His job is threatened and his wife (Sari Lennik) is asking for a divorce to marry their obnoxiously tender friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Larry teaches Schrodinger’s paradox of the cat, which must be assumed to be both dead and alive. He teaches with zeal, a feeling unreciprocated by his students. He confesses to a failing South Korean student that he does not understand the paradox, but uses it like a fable to emphasize the concepts and theories. The prologue of the film is a Yiddish fable of a self-proclaimed rational man who invites an old man home for dinner. His skeptical wife claims that the old man is a dybbbuk, the Jewish equivalent of a zombie. Both fables, in science and folklore, allude to the idea of false perception. Larry’s fault is that he has no perception. Behind his thick glasses he can only observe the world in terms of facts like the mathematics he teaches, which attempts to explain the world in a logical manner. He stands on his roof to fix the antennae, and triumphantly surveys his neighborhood. His gaze is equally confused when he sees his redneck neighbors, father and son, playing catch, as when he sees his other neighbor, considerably more attractive, sunbathing nude. Not only are there fables, but dream sequences, and characters under the influence of narcotics. The Coen brothers are playing with the concept of reality to the point that we can hardly distinguish what is real and make believe. This makes the film akin to the bible, which proclaims to be fact, but mixes unfathomable fairy tale elements. The Midwest certainly is not Eden, but its not Sodom either.

 A Serious Man is a comedy of sorts. We laugh if only not to cry. Larry is an innocent man, trapped in a world he doesn’t understand, tormented by forces out of his control. He seeks spiritual advice from three rabbis, one more useless than the last. In fact, the only person who seems reasonable and honest is Larry’s divorce attorney. The score by Carter Burwell is of a deep and melancholic sadness, placing strong emphasis on the hopelessness of human existence. Yes, the film is a comedy, but that’s not a limitation. We never laugh at Larry, but only his surrounding world. When Larry’s brother cries out at night, wondering why God has given him nothing, there is not a hint of irony. When the film ends we leave battered and bruised. The film lingers as a tragedy, not a comedy. We recognize Larry Gopnik as ourselves, a useless, little cog in a world that doesn’t need us or want us. Amen.

-Jason Bardin

Paul Giamatti has a wife (Emily Watson), but all we know about her is that she shares a bed with him and is at least somewhat concerned with his well-being.  Watson’s talents are completely wasted—the material written for her throughout this entire screenplay doesn’t allow her to do a fraction of what she was given in her small role in Synecdoche, New York.  Nina (Dina Korzun) is called a “mule” because her job is to serve as a host for souls and smuggle them from Russia to the U.S.  For a woman who has experienced so many souls, she has a shocking lack of insight into the human condition, and the most interesting thing she does is put little stickers on her fingers so that she can get past a bioscan at customs.  Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) runs the soul-swapping business and gets in a few good lines, but he doesn’t leave much of an impression in your mind when he’s not in a scene or after the movie is over.  Oleg (Boris Kievsky) is the leader of the Russian smuggling business, and his wife Sveta (Katheryn Winnick) is a star in Russian soaps.  Both behave exactly as you’d expect them to.

Especially given the ample creative opportunities granted by a script that deals with souls, the movie’s visuals fail to hold the viewer’s interest.  When she wants to get emotion out of the camera, director Sophie Barthes rapidly brings it out of focus and then back into focus.  Getting your soul sucked out looks an awful lot like getting an MRI.  When we do get a brief glimpse at Giamatti’s inner soul, all we get are some images of mother and child and strange, powdered white creepy-looking people.  I had no emotional or intellectual response to these images to speak of.  If you did, please comment and tell me what I was missing.

The plot is as follows: Giamatti’s soul is stolen and taken to Russia, and then he goes to Russia and retrieves it.  That’s all there is to it.  While movies can certainly succeed without intricate plots, this one drags horribly.  Still, this movie had its moments.

A fine short could have been made out of Giamatti’s first scene with Dr. Flintstein and his performance of Vanya while soulless.  Gags and one-liners give these scenes a zaniness that the rest of the movie lacks.  Jokes include a soul that looks like a chickpea, two lovers who are excited that their souls will be stored together, fear of a soul being sent to New Jersey for storage, and the ridiculous contrasts between performances of Vanya with and without various souls.  While I think you’d enjoy watching this short if it is ever made, this handful of scenes cannot hold up the rest.

-Robert Henderson

The year is 1969, and Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is trying to help his Jewish parents, Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman & Imelda Staunton) save their dilapidated Catskill motel from being foreclosed.  Jake and Sonia clomp around their property with a disdain for the lifestyle they have chosen to lead.  They both hate their business, and there’s never any clear motivation on any character’s part as to why they didn’t sell the old place years ago and make a living doing something that they both don’t utterly despise.  Then some rather uninteresting things happen, all of which laying a path for Elliot to act as a middleman in getting the Woodstock Music Festival moved to Bethel, NY.  The festival that was supposed to have a little over a hundred thousand attendees quickly has half a million.  Throughout this, we are only privy to Elliot’s experience at the festival (after all, this is based on a memoir).  The memoir is supposed to explore the complexities of leading a double life as a Greenwich Village gay-rights advocate and a straight businessman in the conservative town of Bethel.  The movie virtually ignores this entire theme, with the exception of a minor romantic subplot that has no impact on any other events in the story.

The first half of the film exists solely to establish a range of clichés.  First there are Elliot’s decidedly Jewish parents, an old married couple virtually incapable of showing any affection for anyone.  In one not particularly memorable scene Elliot’s mom extrapolates on life after potential foreclosure with the line: “And then on goes the gas!”  It’s moments like this that complete her Seinfeld-esque transformation into the archetype Jewish parent.  Next we meet Elliot’s childhood acquaintance, Billy (Emile Hirsch), the ex-Vietnam vet who has sporadic (yet somewhat comical) flashbacks.  He spouts such indelible insights as “over in Nam I’m fuckin’ normal!”  There’s also the “variety” of Bethel townspeople, who all seem to hold the same predictable opinions, and act at all times with a terribly un-endearing mob mentality.  There’s the group of cliché hippies running the festival, and their accompanying suits who seem to do little more than carry briefcases and stand in clusters.  It would be nice if the movie went on to force these varied groups to unite and hopefully learn to appreciate one another; a pity no such thing happens.  There might be a single uniting of unlikely characters alluded to, but nothing such happens on-screen.

The main issue with this film is its floundering of purpose.  It’s a movie about Woodstock that never makes it to the festival.  It’s a film about a closeted homosexual that never quite has to deal with coming out.  It’s a movie about a family learning to trust one another for profit.  It’s nearly two hours about varied groups doing nothing with any apparent variety.  Essentially, this movie is about an incredible event, told in a painfully un-incredible way.

It’s a given that any film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival is going to take a lot from the definitive film account of the festival, Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary, Woodstock.  Where Taking Woodstock tries to be about the impact of the festival on one person and his direct acquaintances, Woodstock is a direct account of the festival itself.  Ang Lee has done homage to this nearly 40-year-old film foremost in his cinematography.  While Wadleigh used split screen as a means to emphasize the diverse experiences all happening simultaneously at the festival, Lee has opted for this “multi-ring circus” concept instead as a mean of convoluting the point of view of his lead character.  Woodstock had multiple cameramen shooting multiple actions from multiple angles, therefore split-screens make absolute sense.  Taking Woodstock is about a single person’s perspective, yet split screens persist, seemingly giving Elliot several consciousnesses, all gawking at different things simultaneously.

Lee also has stuck in a few recreations of specific events depicted by Wadleigh.  Sometimes he is just content to show a recognizable image in the background (i.e. a nun giving a piece sign to a cameraman).  These moments aren’t obtrusive, and act as fun “easter eggs” for those familiar with the 1970 film.  There are other times, however, where Lee takes a piece of Wadleigh’s imagery, and attempts to inject additional meaning into it by having a character explain its personal significance.  Before Billy slides down the famous muddy hill, he explains to Elliot how this hill has been a reoccurring object in his life.  His explanation coupled with his proclamation, “I love this hill!” seem to devalue all of the other attendees similar enjoyment of said hill.  This moment isn’t one about sharing an experience with likeminded people— it has been debased so that only Billy seems to have a reason to feel something.  These isolating moments fall one after another, culminating in Elliot’s acid trip in the back of a stranger’s van.  Elliot never bonds with his fellow trippers, or any other specific people.  He exists as a narrator that doesn’t participate in the grand point of the festival.  The emphasis of Woodstock has ceased to be one of togetherness; Lee has ignored the ultimate point of the festival and instead made a movie about vague personal growth.

-Paul Brinnel

What Ephron does wrong in terms of title cards she does right in what John Huston considered the most important aspect of directing: casting. Has there ever been a less controversial choice of an actor to portray an iconic figure on film than Meryl Streep? She approaches the role of Child wisely, not as an important figure, aware of who she is and what she will become, but as a normal person, whose spirit, not to mention height, is higher than average. We first meet Julia Child in France, 1949. Her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) is a foreign-service officer, temporarily assigned in Paris; Julia is not about to become a blasé, domesticated housewife. She decides to pursue her interests. Not finding the worlds of weaving hats and playing bridge exciting enough, she settles on cooking. Initially Julia is tormented in the all-male kitchen, humiliated even by her instructor. Later, when she becomes a teacher of French cooking to Americans in Paris, she makes an effort to always be supportive toward her students, even congratulating them on their mistakes in a sincere and joyful manner.  This effervescence could become irritating, but Streep handles her character in a delicate way, similar to Sally Hawkin’s portrayal of the even more cheerful Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky.  Streep’s Child shows a determination and sense of hard work that justifies her cockiness and bravado. Her high-octane personality is accentuated by the church bell hymn of Child’s voice. Just like last year in Doubt, when Streep pounced at the opportunity of transforming a serious, overwritten character into a hammy, comedic goldmine, here she takes Julia Child’s unique vocal cords, and transforms words like “do” and “oh” into melodic symphonies.

Preventing the story of Julia Child from becoming a standard biopic is the counterpoint story of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twenty-nine year old would-be writer, living above a pizza shop in post 9/11 Queens. Out of desperation and in search of meaning, Powell decides to start a blog in which she’ll cook Julia Child’s entire cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year. Powell is a wreck, which doesn’t help since her scenes are contrasted with the self-proclaimed fearless Child. Ephron has Powell crying in two separate scenes within the first five minutes.  Adams’ casting is essential. She is able to provide compassion to Powell, who is insecure and emotionally fragile.  We immediately empathize with her after we see her have lunch with her three friends. This scene is Ephron’s critique of the Sex and the City culture. That series and its subsequent film depicted women in New York as sex craved, vapid, vain, and ultimately boring, without any original thoughts, and a complete lack of understanding not only about men, but what it’s like to be a normal, functioning human being. Powell’s friends are depicted as rude and self-centered. Powell, on the other hand, is sweet and earnest, and in a highly compatible marriage.

The counterpoint between Julie and Julia provides a rare look into legacy. We often see great persons depicted in lavish and heavy-handed film biographies, where the director wants the audience to believe that this person was a vital part in the course of human history. In cases like Ghandi and Malcolm X that thesis can be justified. But does someone like Jim Braddock really need to be portrayed as if he cured the great depression?  Ephron portrays the life of Julia Child in a light, breezy tone; acceptable for the life she led. The Julie Powell segments allow us to better appreciate Child because we can see that she not only lived an extraordinary life, but that her legacy indeed affected others.

-Jason Bardin

The camera work must have been entrusted to a hyperactive child, and, at least for the first few minutes (which feel much longer), the audience is treated like one.  Mommy, is this the zoom button?  Wow!  I can zoom in, and out, and back in again, and really fast!  Gee, that man (British minister of international development Simon Foster, played by Tom Hollander) sure looks angry.  I’ll follow him back to his office!  It’s so boring holding the camera in one place.  I can look from this side, and that side, and that other side too!  This other man in the office (civil servant Malcom Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi) says a lot of naughty things that make me laugh really loud!  In a sense it’s a gift to be able to laugh loudly whenever any combination of a certain set of seven words is said.  Like other natural gifts, it’s much more considerate to enjoy it at home than in the movie theater.

The lingua franca between the two countries divided by a common language seems to be the one-liner.  Some are clever, some are mediocre, and many are threats of sexual violence delivered in a Scottish accent.  Delivering the one-liners is a small army of one-dimensional characters.  Unfortunately, none of them is played by Peter Sellers.  Simon was born with his foot in his mouth, and his young press secretary Toby (Chris Addison) is charged with fixing his reputation during their trip to Washington.  But Toby’s American old flame Liza (Anna Chlumsky) lives in Washington, and he’s under the delusion that “what happens in Washington stays in Washington.”  Liza seems to be the only person in the State Department who thinks the war’s a bad idea, who convinces her helpless boss Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) to advocate for peace, along with a fat, sensitive general (James Gandolfini) whose war-mongering rival is Linton Barwick (David Rasche), whose aide is—enough already, if you want to know who he is, go to IMDB.  And there’s a prim and proper Oxbridge man (Chris Langham) and an attractive woman (Gina Mckee) thrown into bit roles just for kicks.

The movie tries as hard as it can to be zany with its quirky characters, speed-talking, quick takes, and calm, classical score that brings these features into relief.  Alas, fast-talking alone does not zaniness make.  The dialogue between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night is both razor-sharp and hilarious, but it wouldn’t work without images like the hitchhiking and the destruction of the walls of Jericho.  In The Loop gives us far too few memorable images, but they’re fairly well done.  The fat general calculating troop concentrations in a little girl’s room using her oversized pink talking calculator.  The Capitol Hill staffers burning off steam in a mosh pit.  The dissatisfied constituents in an ancient gym and a collapsing brick wall which, of all possible things, brings about Simon’s political ruin.

This movie falls short even in its strong suit of one-liners.  Dr. Strangelove gives us the timeless exclamation of, “You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”  When the Meditation Room at U.N. Headquarters is overtaken by profanity warfare, the British ambassador briefly spoils the fun by reminding the belligerents of the room’s intended purpose.  But then Malcom’s filthy mouth opens yet again.

-Robert Henderson

Plunged into the incredibly convincing fallout of a commercially successful comedian’s career, we meet George Simmons (Adam Sandler), the rich bastard who just found out he’s dying.  Realizing that he’s driven away every human being in his life, he finds a rather pathetic standup comic, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), and for whatever reason, invites him to write for him, and to hopefully also become his friend.  Maybe this would be heartwarming were it in minimalist Kurosawa film from 1952, but unfortunately we’re stuck with the writer/director of The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Judd Apatow has attempted to make a meta-comedy.  This movie is not about laughing at raunchy witticisms; it is about what fuels people to make said quips.  While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but think of the 1981 Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories.  Both movies take what could be comically lucrative situations and ruin with them with lofty self-actualized humor.  Of course I’m not saying that comedians don’t deserve to be broken down, but the movies that do it best manage to maintain relatability within the lead character regardless of the humor or tragedy of any given situation.  Three superior films that play off similar themes are Lenny, Man on the Moon, and The Comic.  Where Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey, and Dick Van Dyke respectively succeed is in just how much they connected to the viewer.  You felt good when they felt good, and bad when they felt bad.  A simple moviemaking device, but nonetheless important to maintaining weight and investment in the story.  I’m well aware that where Funny People differs from these three movies in that the main character of the movie, Wright, isn’t said tragic comedian, but merely an impartial observer telling the story of the comic.  Regardless, in order to instead connect with this observer, motivations need to be clear.  In this movie a pathetic idiot befriends a despondent jerk, and then puts up with a lot of endless grief pursuing a lifestyle he is drawn to for no explainable reason.  Everything Wright envies about Simmons seems to be either completely superficial or completely vain.  This part of the story feels like a dumbed down, modernized version of La Dolce Vita, minus any carried out attempt at substance.

Eventually the movie stumbles into a more upbeat second act, where Simmons is meant to use all of the lessons he learned in his previous screen time.  Oddly enough though, he hasn’t learned a thing.  If anything, he has regressed to just the same old bastard he was, except now without any of the ridiculous moroseness.  What’s left is a poorly staged domestic drama where a tragic love triangle turns into a completely unmemorable exchange of by the book conflicted romance dialogue.  This whole sequence is so slight that I found myself beginning to doze at times fueled wholly by the ennui of this plodding and overplayed cliché.  Not until this second act does it really strike you just how bad Apatow is at writing/developing any women characters.  With the emergence of Laura (Leslie Mann) as Simmons’ love interest, it becomes even more obvious that you’re watching a movie with a predestined outcome.  Believability and fluidity of romance are destroyed when the audience can’t understand why a female character is considered at all desirable.  In this case, the fault belongs to both Apatow for inherently not understanding women, and Mann for playing her character with such convincing objectivity.

Over the course of this nearly 2 and a half hour movie, I witnessed at least a dozen people in the audience leaving.  Despite a plethora of shlong shtick, Funny People certainly doesn’t appeal to anyone looking for this year’s frat boy, gross-out comedy.  Unfortunately, Funny People also fails to be insightful enough to strike a chord with higher brow viewers, too.  When everything is said and done, all that’s really left is a pile of peters that failed at self-actualization.

-Paul Brinnel

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a fractured time sequence. It is wisely less concerned about how Tom and Summer get together as it is with their time spent as a couple and the aftermath of their break-up. This separates it from the majority of romantic comedies, which mostly take about ninety minutes getting two people together through the most convoluted situations imaginable. Here we have a film that knows that it’s easy for two young, good looking individuals to start dating each other. Tom and Summer work together. He writes greeting cards, she’s the assistant to his boss. One night the whole office goes out to karaoke, she falls in love with him, watching him perform, the next day they kiss by the copy machines. Boom, bang, done.

The film that 500 Days of Summer is comparable to is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another film showing the development and fall of an interesting relationship, from the point of view of a male protagonist. It too uses surrealistic touches. However, in Annie Hall those moments are used to portray Alvy Singer’s desires. He’s either romancing the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, discovering what his former classmates have become, or pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to prove a point to a total stranger. These moments compliment Alvy’s self-centered persona. The use of surrealism in 500 Days of Summer is to portray heightened visuals of Tom’s inner emotions. When he is feeling elated and confident, it appears as if everyone on the street is smiling at him right before they transform into Broadway showmen and break out into a choreographed dance number. When Tom is feeling anxiety over an upcoming interaction with Summer, a split screen parallels Tom’s expectations for his evening with the actual encounter. This technique simultaneously reflects his hopes and dreams while showing the façade he must present amidst tragic disappointment.

When Tom isn’t in fantasyland he’s at his job, writing greeting cards. He wears sweater-vest and tie combinations or t-shirts that promote bands like The Clash, who haven’t needed promotion since they broke up in the mid eighties. That’s the problem with Tom, who like most hipsters, is living in a time warp. Upset by modern culture, he constantly pontificates about how horrible it is that women don’t dress like they did in England in nineteen sixty-four or how he hates to live in a world where no one has heard of an alternative, indie rock band that he happens to like. This hipster mentality borders on fascism as Tom, the failed architect, confides to Summer that if he were in charge he would make people notice the beauty in Los Angeles. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom with equal amounts confidence and nervousness. We like him despite his trendy, social attires and worldviews. He’s funny and spontaneous, but fragile too. And in all fairness, when he does don a suit he looks totally out of place. After all, how bad can anybody be when their heartbroken dreams transport them into Ingmar Bergman films?

Summer is not as easy to understand. She could have used the guidance of a female writer on her side. When the often annoying narrator isn’t condescendingly telling us how we are supposed to feel about the characters, what the characters are thinking, or just blatantly stating the themes of the film, it serves a purpose in relaying Summer’s back-story. The narrator informs us that Summer has some sort of inherent knack that makes every man attracted to her, and she knows it. She’s like Christine in The Rules of the Game: every man wants her; we’re not exactly sure why. At least Christine had a famous composer father, which justified Octave’s fascination. Summer just has long, black hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Well, I guess that’s enough. Summer, too is a hipster, which explains Tom and Summer’s mutual fascination with each other. When she proclaims her favorite Beatle is Ringo, I was just surprised that it wasn’t Pete Best.

After these two get together the movie really starts cooking. Despite the jumbled chronology, the film is more or less in order. Harold Pinter would probably just call this a straight forward narrative. Anyway, the relationship between the two expresses the joy of early love. They play house in a department store; he draws the skyline on her arm. The conversations never run too deep. Their break-up comes along at the moment when they would begin to confide more to each other. After they break up, the film hits a perfect note. They’re still friends. Tom’s still madly in love with Summer, but she’s moved on. We move deeper and deeper into Tom’s head, as we share his sadness and longing in a way that we couldn’t really share his desires or happiness. He’s with Summer, but not with Summer. Their moments together become painful as they get on each other’s nerves, and gradually separate. This all leads up to a moment when they go see The Graduate together. Never has that last shot felt so sad and empty; Elaine and Ben Braddock, sitting next to each other on the bus, with their future ahead of them. But what future? How far can love take two lost souls? This open-ended ending will continue to haunt generations of alienated teens. 500 Days of Summer, should have paid a bit more attention to Mike Nichols’ film, and ditched it’s cutesy epilogue segment, which is not in tune with the rest of the film, providing closure for these characters. I don’t need or want closure, I want these characters to be suspended in space and time, immortal.

-Jason Bardin

The movie opens up with a short ecstasy induced monologue where we first learn to hate Brüno.  He then treats us to a scene of him performing various sex acts with a pygmy named Diesel (convincingly played by Clifford Bañagale), which seems to be right out of an Austin Powers movie.  Shortly thereafter he is shunned by the Austrian fashion world he alleges to have belonged to, and is then shuttled off to the U.S. to shout unmarketable catchphrases at B-list celebrities.

The basic format of each vignette in the movie goes as follows: first Brüno says or does something inappropriate.  Then the affected party either yells at Brüno, ignores him, or runs away while also opting for one of the former two options.  Keep the camera pointlessly running for a few minutes after the punch line, then multiply this times a dozen and you have in essence, Brüno.   Even with this repetition withstanding, at an 88 minute running time, it is painfully obvious that the producers were scraping the bottom of the barrel to get enough viewable footage to consider this a “feature film.”  This film would have been more suited had it instead been released as a 45-minute HBO comedy special.

Littered throughout the mess are scenes between Brüno and his assistant that are meant to connect the dots, giving us a reason for the characters to move onto the next scene.  These moments feel like they were stripped right out of a Fiedberg and Seltzer movie (i.e. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie).  Need I say more?

After Brüno has played the pilot of his new talk show to a focus group, we are left with the comments made by some members of the test audience.  After watching Brüno interview clueless celebrities and wag his genitals at the camera, one man responds, “No logical person would ever consider a show like that unless they had some sort of moral defect.”  Let’s just say that I left with the same sentiment.

-Paul Brinnel

Speaking of New York, Whatever Works marks Woody Allen’s return to his city after a rather unsuccessful tryst in Europe. Allen’s back in Manhattan! Literally, as the plot for Whatever Works calls for Boris to fall in love with a woman nearly forty years younger than he is, in a relationship scenario eerily similar to that of Woody Allen’s own Manhattan. However, the young women in both films are different, to say the least. Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), the young ingénue of Whatever Works, is nothing like the Muriel Hemingway character in Manhattan. That character was an intellectual student who was more mature and self-confident than the protagonist played by Allen. Melody is a ditsy beauty pageant contestant from the South who is probably too stupid to know that people have ages and that Boris is older. And despite her name, she fails to appreciate the classical music that Boris attempts to expose her to, opting instead to attend concert performances by bands called Anal Sphincter. Meanwhile Allen once again provides a Dixieland jazz soundtrack, which is beginning to make it feel like he’s making a parody of his own films. If the relationship doesn’t appear to work on paper, that’s because Melody and Boris don’t exactly ignite sparks on the screen either. They have nothing to say to each other. No conversation, no common interests, and not even a few shared laughs. And then they’re married.

Allen doesn’t have much for these characters to do. Every scene is just the two of them eating in a different location in New York. Whatever Works hardly feels like a film at all. It’s more like a play. In fact, who needs these visuals at all? Although without the images as distraction, one might discover how vacuous the script is. And why does Woody Allen insist on working with the best contemporary cinematographers? This time Allen hired Harris Savides, whose work on films like Elephant, Zodiac, and Milk has established him as a craftsman of profound beauty and sensitivity. Here he does his best to make sure everyone is well lit and in focus.

Needless to say the characters run out of things to say, so halfway through a whole new crop of actors enter the picture. Patricia Clarkson comes in as Melody’s mother, who transforms into a Bohemian love goddess. Following her is Ed Bagley Jr. as Melody’s father. This character is so underdeveloped that it’s rather just a waste of time when we discover that he’s a closet homosexual. Allen’s point here is to provide further examples to justify his title, perhaps because Boris doesn’t really follow his own mantra. He says it to the camera every once in a while, but his life is really nothing more than being upset at everything, which really doesn’t work for him.

And in the end what are we left with? A happy ending that proposes that everyone can get along if we all do whatever works, which justifies Charles Manson’s existence, I suppose. There is a point when Boris talks to the audience and questions whether anyone is even in the theater. If he had addressed the audience as the suckers we are, members of a diminishing society, vainly hoping that Woody Allen will return to making films that deal with complex themes about the nature of life and realistic portrayals of relationships between men and women, then Allen would have made at least one insightful comment in this film. Anyone remember the days when Woody Allen made films concerning themes a bit deeper than a two word alliterated title?

-Jason Bardin