The release of a new Woody Allen film is one of those annual events that make you realise just how quickly a year has gone. Just when you’ve had time to savour and digest his latest work, up pops another. Given his remarkable work-rate, it’s not surprising that the quality of his films vary wildly. Fortunately for us, Whatever Works is perhaps Allen’s best film of the noughties and dispels any of our fears that the celebrated auteur is losing his creative touch.
After a flurry of middling films set in London and Barcelona, Whatever Works sees Allen return, at long last, to his beloved New York. Not appearing much in his own films nowadays, Allen’s traditional role as the brainy, brooding, neurotic protagonist is filled here by Curb your Enthusiasm star Larry David. True to form, David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a grouchy, cantankerous and conceited Columbia physics lecturer whose existential gloom leads him to attempt suicide by jumping out of a window, only to land on a canopy and end up with a pronounced limp. Breaking off any links with his former, enviable life, he divorces his wife, gives up his prestigious university-post and moves to a dank, grubby flat, filling the days by teaching chess to children and ranting with his friends about the fatuousness of life.
It seems that nothing can arouse Boris from his torpor, until Melodie, a naïve young woman turns up on his doorstep looking for shelter, having run away from her parents in Mississippi. Boris reluctantly allows Melodie to lodge in his flat, but treats her with humungous condescension, deriding her looks, relative lack of intelligence and childlike view of the universe. However, Melodie is not put off by Boris’ intellectual arrogance, and quickly falls in love with him. Soon, to his enormous surprise, Boris finds himself falling for her in return.
There’s an odd but gratifying symmetry between the ever-exuberant Melodie and the perennially-pessimistic Boris. A pervading theme in Woody Allen movies is the cruel randomness of life; how events beyond our control determine the development of our lives as much as our decisions. But here, Allen emphasises that the random nature of the universe is just as responsible for our joy in life as it is for our despair. After all, it was luck that meant Boris survived his suicide-attempt at the beginning of the film and met Melodie, which was in itself another chance-encounter, since Boris’s flat was one of the millions in New York that she might have ended up at after her flight from Mississippi.
However, taking after Chekov, who balanced his plays with as much tragic-realism as comedy, Allen’s films are too complex to leave his characters eternally-content after a few random events, and there is much heartbreak for all concerned. The surprise arrival of Melodie’s god-fearing conservative parents in New York and the fact that her blossoming maturity and confidence arouses the attention of the city’s handsome young men leads to terminal strains in her relationship with Boris. Only with a great deal of soul-searching and honesty about who we are is happiness made attainable for the film’s characters. And New York is shown to be the kind of forward-thinking bohemian utopia where it is possible to be honest with oneself.
Of all his former films, perhaps Allen’s latest piece resembles Hannah and her Sisters most closely. Both are huge in scale and suggest that there is a very fine line between randomness and design determining our lives. Both films achieve a perfectly wrought marriage of comedy and drama, with the almost farcically effervescent relationship between Boris and Melodie being followed by their sober separation. And finally, despite having pessimistic undercurrents, both films have upbeat and happy denouements. Acknowledging the fact that life so often ends in misery rather than happiness, Boris aptly repeats his view on life, espoused at the beginning of the movie, that “whatever works”. We can not predict our futures, there is no way of fathoming the impenetrable meaning of the universe, but we should bask in our ignorance. We should be content with every smidgeon of joy that life throws up at us, because cruel chance can change our fortunes at any moment.
By returning so often to the grand themes of the meaning of life and the capriciousness of fate and chance, there are obvious overlaps between Whatever Works and many of Allen’s other films. But this is the most meditative, wide-ranging, ambitious and downright enjoyable Woody Allen film in years, so let’s hope he continues to follow his muse, regardless of what his critics say, and create whatever works for him.
