A Case of You (2013)
Everyone has a boss or an uncle that revels in telling the same story over and over again. It was really funny the first time you heard it, and it was fine to hear it again when the boss or uncle told it to somebody else. You even tolerated it when he told the same story twice in one day, just because somebody new walked into the room and an uncomfortable silence was in the air.
But now it’s the eighth time that story somehow squeezed its way into a conversation, and you know every twist and the punchline word for word.
If you’ve never seen a Woody Allen comedy, Whatever Works is pretty funny. But if you’ve navigated your way to this point through Annie Hall and Manhattan or even his less stellar 1990s period including Everyone Says I Love You and Deconstructing Harry, you have heard Allen or his on-screen surrogates discuss relationships, religion, society, and the opposite sex in pretty much the same way every time. For you, Whatever Works probably won’t work.
In his latest film, Allen hitches his specific and unaltered worldview to Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a physicist who was once “considered” for the Nobel Prize. Neuroses got the better of him, and soon after hitting his professional zenith, Boris fell off dramatically, symbolized by his attempted suicide, a running jump out of his penthouse window that ended on the canopy below.
Now instead of leaving the world he can’t abide, Boris walks through it with a limp. He is simply overwhelmed by society and the “cretins” in it. His best rants about the idiocy that he faces on a daily basis involve calling people he thinks are beneath him inchworms or earthworms. We hear one or the other about every three minutes.
Boris’ judgments are put to the test when he meets and is instantly repelled by Melody (Evan Rachel Wood ), a pretty but uneducated southern runaway. For reasons that simply can’t be made clear other than being in the interest of developing a plot, Boris lets Melody live in his apartment. For a month or so. Naturally – for this is a Woody Allen film – she falls madly in love with the godless curmudgeon at least 35 years her senior.
The movie is filled with odd pairings like that, and two of them involve Melody’s parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr.), who have divorced since their daughter’s disappearance but have wound up in Manhattan around the same time looking for her. Most of these relationships have their charms even though they’re far-fetched. Then again, look at the title.
Though this is far from being classic Woody Allen, there is plenty of Allen’s classic cynicism, some of which is more effective in other movies than it is here. Some of Boris’ monologues get some big laughs. Woody has said he wrote this movie 30 years ago for Zero Mostel, who would have been perfect, but David makes a great mouthpiece for Allen’s specific voice, even though the story is more than a little threadbare.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.