Whatever Works

2009 comedy

Rating: 7/20 (Jen: 3/20)

Plot: Boris is a curmudgeon, a misanthropic former near-Nobel winning physicist who lives alone in a messy apartment following his divorce. A cute runaway from the South winds up on his doorstep. She needs food and shelter, and he decides to help. They sort of fall in love. Then a bunch of other things happen, none of them the least bit funny.

I like Larry David. I really do. So I was pretty excited when I read that he was making a film with Woody Allen. I thought it would be a perfect hilarious storm of neuroses. But oh, Woody. This is a stinker. I'm not going to blame Larry David, although he should have probably read the script and decided on his own, "I better turn this down. I don't think I can convince anybody that I'm a genius. Heck, I don't even think I can convince anybody that I'm an actor." Ninety minutes of movie and my wife and I didn't laugh a single time. That would have been fine if it was clever or sly or witty or something instead, but it wasn't any of those things. It almost seemed like Woody Allen completely lost interest in this movie and decided to rush to an ending, completely ignoring reasonable character development or logic. There's also an annoying breaking-of-the-fourth-wall thing where Larry David's character talks to the audience. It doesn't work. In fact, nothing in Whatever Works works. I should have watched a few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm instead.

Language arts teacher gripe: At one point in the movie, the genius corrects another character's grammar, saying that she used an objective pronoun (us) when she should have used the subjective pronoun (we). Unfortunately for the genius (and for Woody Allen), he was wrong! It was a hypercorrection and dropped this thing another point for me.