Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

Whatever works

Don’t take it lying down
WHATEVER WORKS
Director: Woody Allen
Cert. 12A

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works opens with frustrated intellectual Boris Yelnikoff (Larry David) trying to convince his buddies that there is an audience of ticket holders watching them, waiting to hear his story.

The point being that this lonely nihilist is the only one who can see the big picture! He says: ‘My story is whatever works. You know, as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Anyway you can filch a little joy in this cruel, dog-eat-dog, pointless, black chaos. That’s my story’. Resurrecting a script he originally wrote over 30 years ago, this is not Woody Allen at his most subtle.

The paper-thin story (more a vehicle for ideas) follows Boris as he rants about his worldview to whoever may listen, and then is confronted by young runaway Melodie, with whom he falls in love, despite finding her immature and shallow. Woody’s theatrical style of direction is not up everyone’s alley, but, after all these years, he sure has got it down to a T.

Allen’s hopeless fear of death comes through as the protagonist suffers from waking in the night, deeply fearful of the fact that one day he will die. Allen could easily have played this character, but perhaps he felt it would be too on the nose to play what is basically a caricature of himself. To be fair, in the script the impression is strongly given of Allen acknowledging the absurdity of fearing death when you don’t believe that anything comes after it.

Christians are attacked in a manner that would send any self-respecting Muslim into serious revenge mode had it been an attack on their religion: two pious Christian characters are introduced who gradually ‘learn’ that they are trapped by their own delusions and have been denying themselves the only sources of pleasure and joy available in life, such as casual sex and universal tolerance.

It is very clever and very funny, but the blatant misanthropy and the venom shown towards Christianity, in particular, seem to contradict Boris saying: ‘You know, as long as you don’t hurt anybody’.

Peter D. Marsay,
filmmaker/writer