Whatever Works.

You need to go into this film with a couple of things understood. It's a Woody
Allen film, of the old school. Beautiful, naive women are going to fall in love
with neurotic old men. Second, it's a Woody Allen film, of the old school. In
general, it's going to be true because it's funny, rather than true because
it's accurate to real life in any sense.

It is, particularly, a Woody Allen film, of the old school, because it's a
script that Woody Allen was going to film next starring Zero Mostel, and was
shelved because Zero Mostel died in 1977. So in one way, it's actually back to
an earlier, funnier time for Woody Allen. But in another way, it seems
bizarrely time-lost in that 70s New York commune of artists and intellectuals
who inhabited Woody Allen's early work, and in a way it seems as anachronistic
as those old films which had both dinosaurs and cavemen in them. There was a
big fucking asteroid that wiped out the 60s and 70s free love movement, Woody.
Didn't you hear? He really should have set it in the 70s and have done with it.

But, for all that, this was the film that, had history not gone the way it did,
would have followed up Annie Hall.

As filmed today, Larry David's in the central Woody Allen style neurotic Jewish
Guy role. This time as a genius physicist turned dropout who thinks the whole
world and everyone in it is stupid. He bumps into Evan Rachel Wood, who's a
naive runaway from Mississippi, and reluctantly takes her in, becoming friends
as she basically becomes a receptive audience for his nihilistic ranting. Then
more stuff happens, like her mother arrives from Mississippi looking for her,
and also gets swallowed up by the seemingly impossible to avoid gravitational
field of the New York arty intellectual scene. And so forth. Cue much
intellectual and emotional musical chairs, as we discover that in order to gain
happiness, we need to accept Whatever Works. As Larry David lectures us,
laboriously, to camera.

For the most part it's good, because mostly everyone in it is very good, and the
script is sparky and crackling like early Woody Allen films always were. Where
it's not so good is the occasional scene where you feel the delivery is off,
and maybe we could have used one or two more takes to get it right, and Larry
David in general, who's his Curb Your Enthusiasm self when he's in dialogue,
but who is occasionally required to reel off these long scripted rants, and
he's not great at it.

Still, if you liked Annie Hall or Play It Again Sam, this is another film by
Woody Allen in that vein, and you can't say fairer than that.