Everything we pretend to hold sacred now will probably be forgotten over a loud sneeze or less than remarkable orgasm ten years from now. Still we have trouble letting go. Money, sex, career, religion, morals, perversions and other things that go don’t go quietly into the night. Sometimes, not giving a shit helps. Even then it is inevitable that one day we’ll wake up, fully aware that it’s just another day to trick ourselves into believing that life has expectations we need to meet; little check points we need to cross in order to die peacefully, knowing that the life and love we once held didn’t go to waste after all.
Boris Yellnikoff knows this and lets us know that he does. He whines about dumb kids who can’t move chess pieces properly, a failed marriage to what’s-her-name, his nemisis – the Nobel Prize, slow moving senior citizens and the lack of enlightened cynicism in today’s society. In Whatever Works, Larry David plays him to perfection. Much like the director of this film – Woody Allen – he takes his character’s gloomy perspective of life a little too seriously. It phsyically shows too. In fact, one of the most entertaining aspects of Whatever Works is the way Boris walks. Prose and poetry collide every time he drags himself to carry out inane chores. Boris’ disgruntled swaying of his three functional limbs (the third lived through a suicide attempt and barely survived to tell the tale) is the accurate and exact synonym of the word Swagger. I almost wanted to land a nasty kick on his good leg and tell him to lie down; only because I didn’t want Boris to suffer the ignominy of existence any more than he himself did .
Living, for this man, is suffering.
Suffering, for me, is the stupid-ass, embarassingly convenient ending.
Everything else is a fucking ball of sunshine. Especially Larry David trying to educate Evan Rachel Wood about her flaws, Ed Begley’s hilarious ramblings at the pub, Patricia Clarkson’s shedding her Stepford suit to become an exaggerated bohemian cliche, and Woody Allen’s sharpish dialogues.
It totally works, but whatever.
