Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm

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Larry David and Evan Rachael Wood star in Woody Allen's new film Whatever Works

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Whatever Works also owes a debt to The Wizard of Oz. Melody is Dorothy, Boris is the fulminating old wizard, and Oz--well, that has to be Manhattan: Gotham as the Emerald City, full of endearing creatures who make dreams come true. The town has a magical effect on its visitors. Melody picks up some of Boris' dour rhetoric, except that for cretins she says "croutons." Her parents, having followed her trail north, get the feeling too. Her staid father (Ed Begley Jr.) unbuttons his sexual inhibitions, and her Blanche DuBois--like mom (a stingingly funny Patricia Clarkson) becomes a noted photographer and full-time free spirit.

Allen unabashedly loved the city in its grimy, dangerous years; his 1979 Manhattan opened with fireworks over Central Park, to the strains of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. That's when the script for Whatever Works first took shape. Today the city is spiffier, and Boris is mired in '70s disgust. But Allen isn't; he's a tour guide to local attractions, from the Statue of Liberty to Madame Tussauds on the Disneyfied 42nd Street. It's a vision of New York City as the welcomer and transformer of all lost souls, possibly including Boris the grouse.

And if you were wondering, the marriage of Boris and Melody is meant as a demonstration that opposites may attract, but they don't last. Taking a cue from Smiles of a Summer Night, one of Allen's favorite Ingmar Bergman films, Whatever Works liberates its characters from their conventional domestic alliances and finds new lovers: like with like, youth with youth, man with surprisingly congenial woman or man.

This movie, though, is more than the sum of the films it echoes, including Allen's own. It's common for reviewers of his recent work to cite an early triumph like Bananas or Annie Hall and find the new ones lacking. Whatever Works is different: it has that young-Woody fizz with a mature comic romanticism; it's been aged in wit. If Allen has a decade or two of films left in him and if he makes a really excellent one years from now, people will say, "It's terrific, but it's no Whatever Works."