“Away We Go” and “Whatever Works” (The ‘Who Do I Hate Most?’ School of Filmmaking)

Woody Allen is an old man.  I don’t mean this as an insult by any means; it’s amazing that he has continued making movies so prolifically into his 70’s.  However, I do sometimes wish he would act his age.  His latest film, “Whatever Works,” suggests that he sees himself on the cutting edge of modern philosophical thought, a voice of The New Morality.  Allen’s protagonist and implied stand-in is Larry David, the harsh wit behind Curb Your Enthusiasm.  David plays Boris Yellnikoff, an old man—once a brilliant physicist, now just a bitter know-it-all who spews bile at his perceived intellectual inferiors (everybody).  Example: an overweight woman accuses Yellnikoff of hitting her child during chess lessons; Boris quickly gets to implying that her husband is cheating on her.  Like Allen, David is a funny man, and he brings game self-deprecation to the role, giving Yellnikoff a cartoonish snarl and helpless fuddy-duddy demeanor. At his best, he gives Boris crusty pathos—suggesting that there’s real flesh and blood beneath the wisecracks.

Unfortunately for all of us, Allen isn’t so interested in flesh and blood these days.  These days, it’s more about Ideas.  This had a pretty engaging result in last year’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” with its deliberately stilted art-posturing and droopy love affairs.  That was a drama; weirdly enough, Allen treats this one, a fluffy extended sitcom, as an opportunity to present his Manifesto of Truthlessness.  Boris, a Tough New Yorker, opens the film with a monologue about how dumb Christianity is (and other religions and conceptions of truth by implication).  He argues that, “like Marxism,” Christianity assumes that if you give people a chance to do good, they will take it.  (Christianity does not teach this, even a little bit.)  Then, lo and behold, some Christians show up.  After Boris has taken in a young runaway from The South (where the religious people are), her parents, full of Jesus-talk and blustery Southern mannerisms, come to claim her.  Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr. do these mannerisms quite adorably, but Allen barely even gives them a chance to act silly before he goes about converting them.  Neither parent responds once to Boris’ vicious remarks about the religion by which they have supposedly been brainwashed; in one scene, Clarkson is yapping on about Jesus, then in the next, Boris explains in a soliloquy that she has become a sex maniac (with a helpful comparison to “those nice young churchgoing boys who suddenly go on a killing spree” or something, just to make sure you don’t miss the point).

Allen’s ideas about “entropy” are kindergarten-level, yet he treats them as the organic principle behind all human activity here.  The result is a propaganda film for the anti-religion religion, the moralism that condemns any attempt at systematic moral thinking as childish and backward.  Gradually, everyone around Boris becomes a hedonist zombie on their way to Allen’s version of happy-ending, leaving David’s amusing world-weariness the sole bright spot.  It also leaves his diatribes of incoherent contempt for the “failed species” (us) as the sole source of thoughtful commentary.  The opening credits are accompanied by Groucho Marx’s nonsense anthem, “Hello, I Must Be Going,” perhaps meant as a reminder that life is short, you might as well have promiscuous sex while you can, etc.  In a smarter Woody Allen film, this might resonate with Allen’s reliably poignant black humor (like the joke in “Annie Hall”: life is brutal and miserable… and so short).  Unfortunately, while Groucho engaged in nonsense to make us laugh, this movie tries to pass it off as profundity.

In theory, “Away We Go” is quite the opposite of “Whatever Works.”  It’s about two nice young people (hipster-ish thirty-somethings) who travel many places, visiting many friends, looking for the right place (and implicitly, the right way) to raise the child they are expecting; the plot is a freeform series of encounters, explorations, and emotional moments. It’s like a mirror to   “Whatever Works,” in which about a nasty old man who never leaves his big-city comfort zone, and it closely adheres to a schematic farce plot.  But the similarity between the movies goes beyond the fact that they both basically fail- “Whatever Works” as a sharp satirical farce, “Away We Go” as a quirky road movie.  The couple, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), are pretty cute, just like Larry David is pretty funny.  (Rudolph gives a performance that is warm and fuzzy in the best way; Krasinski is amiably goofy, if not quite charming.)  But it pretty much stops there.  The movie doesn’t bother to make sure we are invested in their journey, or that we feel their oneness as a couple very strongly- they’re quirky!  They’re cute!  This means that what should be Emotional Moments are often muffled in Quirk.  Burt makes a declaration of love while making fun of Verona’s body image issues, and she makes a playful groaning noise.  Oh, ha ha.  He loves her so much.  Ha.

That approach wouldn’t have to be fatal.  The problem is that much of the time, the movie is in snarky attack mode.  Burt and Verona visit a ridiculous new-agey family, they visit an out-of-control white-trashy family, etc.  As in “Whatever Works,” the actors playing the objects of mockery are skilled and often very funny, but their scenes feel crudely hostile in tone, setting up beastly caricatures in order to knock them down.  Burt and Verona view one family with true affection, that of a couple who have adopted several children since the mother can’t conceive, but even they are ultimately treated as a distasteful specimen, with the mother “compensating” by pole-dancing in a strip club.  Roger Ebert’s review compares these characters to the “grotesques” of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but Anderson wrote in sad sympathy; this movie is concerned with scoring satirical “points.”

Ebert’s glowing review is, for me, extremely revealing about this movie’s aims.  The movie “rolls out after lukewarm reviews accusing Verona and Burt of being smug, superior and condescending. These are not sins if you have something to be smug about and much reason to condescend.”  He closes by mentioning some of the literary, social, and Quirky accomplishments of the real-life couple that wrote the movie, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida.  “I submit that Eggers and Vida are admirable people.  If their characters find they are superior to many people, well, maybe they are.”

If you happen to think that nice, smart, cute people are admirable and would like to have these views validated in cinematic form, I recommend “Away We Go.”  If not, Roger Ebert finds that its protagonists are superior to you.