Whatever Works (2009)

Woody Allen's Whatever Works arrived in 2009 carrying a script written in the early 1970s, and the film wears that provenance like a coat that no longer fits. Larry David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a misanthropic chess teacher who lectures the camera, insults strangers, and eventually marries a runaway from Mississippi half his age. The comedy is broad, the pacing is loose, and the whole enterprise has the air of a man rummaging through an old drawer to see what still holds up.

The film's engagement with contemporary social questions is glancing at best. A gay character, Howard, materializes in a bar to receive John's confession, and the New Year's Eve finale pairs the two men alongside everyone else's rearranged romances. The treatment is genial and entirely comic in register, a punchline about fluidity instead of an argument for it. Marietta, played by Patricia Clarkson, discovers photography, exotic habits, and an open relationship, which gestures toward female reinvention without ever disturbing the film's entrenched perspective on its own ingenue.

Where the film does sermonize, it sermonizes about misanthropy. Boris addresses the audience directly and repeatedly, dispensing a philosophy of lowered expectations and small pleasures. That is a worldview, not a social program, and it lands with the weight of a fortune cookie. The cast is uniformly white, the Manhattan milieu is sealed off from any consideration of race or class, and the environment, the economy, and the body are simply not topics. What remains is a comedy of manners that mistakes its own nostalgia for wisdom. Pleasant enough. Never urgent.