WOODY ALLEN’S EVANGELICAL MOVIE

(from John Marks’ Blog on the Purple State of Mind website.)

I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. The idea of Larry David playing a role that was written for Zero Mostel more than thirty years ago, working from a script dusted off in the midst of the 2007 Writer’s Strike and retrofitted to our era by a grumpy old man better known for his scandals than his films—well, how to put this?

It didn’t strike me as promising material for a night out at the movies. I’d already seen a very good comedy, The Hangover, and a very bad one, Away We Go, and I had my quotient of laughter in summer. At that point, Bruno hadn’t opened yet.

In the end, I based my decision on naked sentiment. I’ve been going to see Woody Allen movies in the theater for three decades, one after the other: Zelig, The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah And Her Sisters, Crimes And Misdemeanors, and on and on, but one day soon, I told myself, maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, maybe next year, mortality would put an end to the privilege, however degraded.

There wouldn’t be any more new Woody Allen movies, so I wouldn’t get to hear a Jazz age standard play over those singular credits or see the names of the cast members in those brittle little fonts. I wouldn’t get to hear the familiar neurosis and musty existentialism and 1960’s Esquire magazine sexual sensibility and jokes that might have been told once on the Jack Paar show.

On that future day, the portal to the peculiar time warp that is a Woody Allen film will close like a dressing room door, never to reopen. When that happens, I told myself, I won’t ever again be able to breathe the cultural air of a time before the Internet and 24-hour cable news, before cell phones and texting and Twitter, the era of my parents’ mid-life adulthood. Woody is one of the last holdovers from a period when books and classical music mattered as much as movies and pop.

Finally, I recalled, his previous movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona was one of the highlights of the previous year, an American movie that genuinely seemed to care about sex. Lately, in these United States, grown-up films on that subject have become an endangered species. We’re all so wary and policy-driven. Almost everything sexual in our current cinema is filtered through adolescence or empowerment or identity, the anti-erotic Big Three, none of which are bad in and of themselves, all of which turn sex into a vehicle for to-do lists of various kinds.

Say what you will about Allen, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he got some heat on screen. The same is not quite true of Whatever Works.

In fact, the new movie is so freighted with a sense of mortality, of last things and final summations, that it seems to despair of anything as vital as sex. Truth to tell, it feels like a last work. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I’ve seen my last Woody Allen movie on the big screen.

In that sense, Whatever Works reminded me a lot of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, which seemed to say good-bye to the art form in every frame. Within a few months of its release, Altman was gone.

Whatever Works also called to mind Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, in which the last great star of westerns revisited his twin themes of masculine honor and retributive violence. What Eastwood has always done with guns, Woody handles with jokes. The two men have been in a silent competition for years to outdo each other in the deconstruction and analysis of the mid-century American male.

The race is almost over, but here at the end we’re seeing a final push.

Eastwood’s foils in Gran Torino were Hmong immigrants. Allen deploys American evangelicals. The screenplay for Whatever Works was written in the 1970’s, when Allen was in the first flush of real stardom, so the movie isn’t entirely of our time, but a lot of it appears to have been rewritten with an eye to scorning the religious conservatives of the Bush years. I can’t imagine that the characters of the Southern Baptist mother and father—I don’t actually know if they’re Southern Baptist on the page—belong to the older time period. If they do, they’ve been modified to suit the needs of a particular kind of East Coast liberal audience of the last decade.

Thank Jehovah for that, too, because if we’d been left with only Larry David’s monologues as the irritable and irritating Boris and the completely unbelievable romance that develops between his character and Evan Rachel Wood, the whole enterprise would have been dead on arrival. Instead, thirty minutes into the movie, just as Allen has hoodwinked us into believing that we’re going to have to watch one more unbearable paean to May-December romance, Patricia Clarkson walks into the story and pulls the rug from under the conceit.

As a Southern mama appalled that her daughter has taken up with a dirty old man–and a Jew, no less!–Clarkson is redemptive. She redeems the movie and the director both.

Allen knows what people think about his attraction to much younger women, on and off screen, and he cannily gives Clarkson’s flustered Christian mother the job of separating Evan Rachel Wood’s Beauty from David’s dyspeptic beast. By the end of the flick, the stars have been aligned in such a way that Allen’s devoted audiences have been disarmed. They get the cultural red meat of watching evangelicals discover sex, abandon god and start to lead fulfilled lives, and they don’t have to suffer through one more film where Allen or one of his proxies gets to go home with a doting twentysomething actress.

Allen gives us a few trademark lines about we need to enjoy this transient existence for all its worth, but the lines are redundant, because we get the picture again and again. We’ve been getting it for forty years. He was never an original thinker, but he’s stayed true to his belief system. I only wish that he’d been courageous enough to let at least one of his religious people keep their faith and find fulfillment. That would have been a sign of late greatness, an indication of a deeper flexibility in a universe that has grown increasingly airtight.

As it is, Whatever Works succeeds at providing a few of the simple pleasures that we associate with Allen’s best work—an occasional giddy sense of fun, a surprising performance or two, a portrait of a kind of New York City utopia that never was, except in these movies. I’ll mourn him on the day he goes, but as anyone who ever loved his work knows, his greatest achievements lie decades back. What we get now is admittance into a museum in which the figures, however lifelike, are beginning to resemble wax.

If he keeps making movies for another decade, I’ll be surprised, but for old times sake, I’ll keep going. Maybe he’s got one more Vicky, or Cristina, or Barcelona up his sleeve.