Rent Whatever Works (2009)

Very funny - Whatever Works review by BE

Woody Allen, master of acerbic wit. Larry David, master at  purveying it. What more could you want?  Only criticism is lack of subtitles. Script was so fast and with American accents, some of the dialogue was missed. 

Lesser Woody. - Whatever Works review by Steve

Curiously patchy Woody Allen comedy in which Larry David addresses the camera in the familiar style of the director, while delivering bitter, pessimistic soliloquies on modern life. He plays an intellectual misanthrope with zero coping mechanisms who, against his better judgement gives refuge to a young southern runaway (Evan Rachel Wood).

After much misogynistic kvetching, they marry... which draws in her conservative mother (Patricia Clarkson) who arrives at his flat like Blanche Dubois, but stays to transform herself into a free thinking/loving Manhattan artist. Then a similar thing happens to the girl's father (Ed Begley jr). So New York serves as a magical medium of transformation.

If it works at all it is by making us accept that David's brutal loathing of himself and the world is a kind of existential pain, which may arouse pity for his emotional need of his vulnerable but generous teenage wife. But Allen then shells that tenuous position by disastrously introducing Henry Cavill as a creepy, oleaginous (younger) rival.

Its conclusions are valid but it feels insubstantial, unfinished and commonplace. The theme of the irrationality of love is voiced much more succinctly and amusingly by Allen elsewhere. It's a career low point for the director. Rather than being titled Whatever Works, it might have been more appropriately named Will This Do?