...or, in summary, freeing up Woody's camera little gives the movie a turgid, lifeless feel.
--Location, location, location. Insularity is one thing, but restricting this story to some grubby Chinatown blocks and a pair of very cursory cutaways to Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty fails to give it the grandeur it deserves.
--Some of my favorite Woody moments involve incidental characters and slight side gags. (Think Jeff Goldblum in
Annie Hall or that great shot in
Manhattan when Isaac, possessed of an odd romantic notion, runs his hand through the Central Park Reservoir and emerges with a fist full of mud.)
Whatever Works was short on these throwaways, and the few that did make their way in failed to connect. Here's a "for example." Randy
Jones, a young actor, hits on Boris's young wife, Melody, by telling her he lives on a houseboat and sits around thinking about "things" and playing his flute. To me, that's one of Woody's best slams against young pretty people in a while -- and God knows I loves my slams against young pretty people. But the line fails when delivered by actor Henry Cavill; he's so dreamy and earnest as to make this sound like a pretty appealing prospect. This should've been a great "put your foot on my heart" moment, but as played it's a shameful echo of Jonathan Rhys Myers's shameful performance in the shamefully overrated
Match Point.
--There's a pretty clear line between what seems like work from the original 1970s script and new additions. The last scene, which I hope to God was written now, was really awful. Just bad, bad, bad.
--All in all,
Whatever Works felt like a successful remake of a great Woody Allen picture from the 1970s. When it's on, baby, it's on. Boris's lectures are hilarious, as are Melody's manglings of his ideas; and Patricia Clarkson's plot was so good it could've been a movie of its own. General critical consensus seems to be, "Woody doing Woody -- again. Get back to Europe!" My problem is that if felt like
Susan Stroman doing Woody.
There's a lot more to say, of course, but I feel this post has already gone
way over for what was intended to be a brief gloss on the film. But it's really a perplexing little picture, a little bit like
Ginger and Fred without the, you know, gusto.
I'm hung up on analyzing it for two reasons: 1) After four years of pretending to want to make and write movies, I'm actually doing it, and I need to dedicate as much time to analyzing film as I have to hacking apart literature; and 2) I've been missing New York a lot lately, and despite its flaws and woeful insularity,
Whatever Works made me miss it even more. I'm interested in hearing what any of you had to say about it -- for some reason, I'm really compelled to figure this sucker out!
