Whatever...

With rambling dialogue, unconvincing characters and an even more implausible plot arc, Woody Allen’s latest flick, “Whatever Works,” seems to take its titular mantra a bit too close to heart.

The film’s premise is one familiar to fans of Allen’s work: The depressing world of an older, neurotic Jewish academic is slightly improved through the companionship of a naive young woman who enters his life by chance. This time around, Larry David, of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame and former “Seinfeld” writer, tries his hand at Allen’s stock character, Boris Yellnikoff. The talented Evan Rachel Wood is the object of Boris’ almost-affection.

In this role, David proves no one plays Woody Allen like Allen himself. Though he certainly puts some energy behind his performance as the isolated, disenchanted Boris, demonstrated through a host of wild hand gesticulations and seemingly endless monologues, David seems ill at ease, as though reading his lines aloud for the first time rather than delivering them in any convincing way.

Boris’ relationship with the young Melody Celestine, a wide-eyed, Mississippi-bred runaway, is meant to be tough to grasp but is so inconceivable that it’s tough to care about. The characters’ “meet cute” can hardly be described as such, with Melody making Boris’ acquaintance as a barely legal homeless woman sitting outside of his apartment one evening. Boris begrudgingly agrees to help Melody find her next meal and gruffly invites her inside; yet some time later, being too indifferent to her presence in his home to make her leave, Boris marries her.

“Whatever Works” stumbles and putters its way through Boris and Melody’s awkward marriage until Melody’s Bible-thumping Southern belle of a mother stampedes through the door of their Manhattan apartment.

Marietta Celestine, played wonderfully by Patricia Clarkson, looks like Melody aged 20 years (despite, one imagines, her best effort to keep those years from showing) and comes into Boris’ life like a storm of hairspray, pocket sermons and sexual repression. She aims to bring her daughter back to Mississippi but finds herself at home in New York and settles there to pursue a career as an artist.

One year later, Melody’s father, John (Ed Begley Jr.), makes his own pilgrimage to the Big Apple and leaves the South to stay. 

After the arrival of her parents, Melody’s relationship with Boris becomes more complicated – and somewhat more predictable. But as Allen would have audiences believe, it’s all for the best.

And for Boris’ tireless pessimism, the film’s conclusion is too rosy to be believed. It seems that everyone finds his or her happy ending in Manhattan, complete with self-actualization and all the feel-good nonsense that Boris spends more than 90 minutes pooh-poohing, only to buy into it in the last five.