Whatever Works | Little White Lies

Whatever Works

25 Jun 2010 / Released: 25 Jun 2010

Elderly man and young woman conversing on a park bench.
Elderly man and young woman conversing on a park bench.
2

Anticipation.

Got a horrible feeling about this one...

2

Enjoyment.

Embarrassingly poor.

1

In Retrospect.

Make it stop!

Larry David might be plugging a gap between Curb series, but Woody Allen can do much better.

For the expectedly mordant love child of two cantankerous Hollywood windbags, Whatever Works is a disappointingly slushy affair. Larry David plays a grouchy self-proclaimed genius named Boris, who vexes acquaintances with his misanthropy and breaks the fourth wall to offload onto literally anyone listening.

But a Mississippi runaway named Melody (Evan Rachel Wood) slops a sickly gloss of innocence and niceness all over Boris’ misery-sodden world when she turns up on his doorstep. While the pair’s chalk and cheese dynamic has its moments, a stream of misfit bit-parters and incongruous plot developments overcomplicate matters. David might be plugging a gap between Curb series, but Allen can do better.

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