Whatever Works

Last night we watched the latest Woody Allen endeavor, "Whatever Works." I should say, right off the bat, that neither Melissa nor I are fans of Larry David, so though we both wanted to see the movie, we were a slight bit hesitant to watch ninety minutes of Larry David.

Right from the start, scene number one, I could tell I was going to love it. Woody Allen is the curmudgeon's curmudgeon, but his embrace of that, his total and complete embodiment of all that is Woody Allen, and his complete candor all combine to make him an impossibly endearing sort for whom I can't keep myself from caring.

Without being a flub like a train accident, unavoidably buckling to keep from hitting the maiden in distress, the character of Boris Yellnikoff is calculatedly misanthropic, isolated, and even almost self-content--in other words, a perfect candidate for love. It is in balance that we find these things, I'm tempted to say, but I realize that it is only when balanced and affecting equilibrium that we attract such things as love and beauty.

Assuredly, it is Allen's voice speaking though Yellnikoff, but what Larry David brings to the role is analogous to what Buckley brings to Cohen's "Hallelujah." Allen's prosaic philosophy could be rendered as it is written, assuredly, like Branagh was able to channel in "Celebrity," but when the original is enhanced by the rendering, it becomes even more beautiful.

It's a stretch to accredit a single line of Allen's script with as such a lofty assessment as beauty, but what Allen is able to seemlessly achieve in the gestalt is nothing short of beautiful. I recently finished Kundera's _The Unbearable Lightness of Being_, and in it, he speaks of the films of the Communist era, how they viewed like propaganda, always trying to portray a glossy picture of the ideal. Kundera's retelling read as somehow far more than just tragic, and it was because of the context in which it was presented. Allen's ideas are perfectly contextual to the story he tells in "Whatever Works."

Though I had heard before that the role was written for Zero Mostel, I couldn't imagine anyone other than Larry David speaking as Boris Yellnikoff. It's as though where David stops and Allen starts is indistinguishable, and while I sincerely doubt that there was much if any ad-libbing on David's part- both because I think Allen is something of a purist who truly has the courage of every one of his insecure convictions and because I regard David as a man who is long-enough-in-the-tooth to recognize that Allen's genius is best-rendered in that purely Allen way- it brings to mind something I learned while studying acting.

It is one of those things I can't surely ascribe to an actual source. Since I so rarely remember my dreams with any real degree of clarity, the details I do recall often blend more readily into the landscape of scenery I have actually beheld. I said I learned it while studying because, like books on my shelf at home, I have vague ideas of when certain things were added to my library. At this point, some fourteen odd years later, it has become like an urban legend; a story to which I have such an affinity that I no longer care if it is true or not.

I heard that acting students in Germany were not allowed to study the theater, to study acting as a profession, until they were thirty years old. I realize, of course, that this can't possibly be the case, but here's the rub: when I heard it, the factoid was relayed with the explanation that until a person is thirty years old, he has not really lived enough to bring the range of human emotions with him to the stage.

Because Larry David is bred of the same culture of a Jewish view of the world through the lens of New York, I believe that were he to ad-lib at all on the set of an Allen film, Woody would do a double-take and look down at the script to see where he had written the line. When a character exists so thoroughly as Boris, it is indubitably the case that his being is so whole because of the characters around him who provide the context.

As with any Woody Allen movie, New York is prominent in the dramatis personae, and watching several of the supporting roles in the movie interact with her is another indication of the wisdom that only she can afford. Whether the pollyanna of Melodie or dramatic plotter of Marietta, Melodie's mother, both from Mississippi, we're afforded a view- presumably based on real-life people- of how New York speaks through people and changes minds as much as any other powerful force.

Hawking says that the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. New York, in all its symphony of culture, refuses to sustain such illusions, and the quasi-fundamentalist characters who enter this story from the deep south are as the tabula rasa, unable to resist the indelible etchings of truth. Of course, the relativity of experience is the instrument through which truth is played, and this movie affords three different sounds through as many characters.

Melodie and her mother, Marietta are pursued late in the story by John, the father, and all three are closer to actualized by the end of the movie. Truly impressionable as even she realizes through the course of the story, Evan Rachel Wood's Melodie spans the range of extremes and winds up someplace closer to balance. Patricia Clarkson's Marietta realizes from her entrance through Boris' apartment door that she doesn't know where to go, and through this story, we see her transcending the role life assigned her down south. And John, projecting his search outward, is clearly looking most for himself- whether what he used to be or what he wants to become. While the story unfolds, so does he, and he is obliged to let his denial die.

More than propaganda, more than formula, and more than just reflections on the surface, "Whatever Works" inspires the viewer to feel, encourages the audience to think, and comes from underneath what we readily perceive. The sharpening stone that Art can truly be, urging us to question our own norms and ushering us in the best cases toward Platonic ideals, will instill actual elan and wake us from whatever we abide to make do.

Unable to sit any longer on the couch, unable to stay any longer in the house, and unable to contain what I felt when the movie ended and the jazz resumed, I hurriedly dressed and readied to venture out, recognizing that the world was as in need of me as I was of it. When Woody Allen speaks, through whatever vessel, I eagerly keen my ears to listen, and when I'm right, I come away richer for the hearing.