Whatever Works
- Larry David: Boris Yellnikoff
- Evan Rachel Wood: Melody St. Ann Celestine
- Henry Cavill: Randy Lee James
- Patricia Clarkson: Marietta Celestine
- Ed Begley Jr.: John Celestine
- Michael McKean: Joe Borckmann
- Carolyn McCormick: Jessica
- Olek Krupa: Morgenstern
- Christopher Evan Welch: Howard Kaminsky
- Jessica Hecht: Helena
Whatever Works - Love Man for Himself ( Original title: Whatever Works ) is a romantic comedy film, which was filmed in the spring of 2008 in New York and on 22 April 2009 opened the Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by Woody Allen.
Action
Whatever Works is the story of more or less ingenious eccentric Boris Yellnikoff, no more than a physics professor (who was once suggested even for the Nobel Prize ) works after a suicide attempt, has separated from his wife and has been living alone in the Lower East Side. One day the young and naive Melody in his life, which is pulled out of her conservative Christian home is pressing. Despite their very different characters and their different educational levels of older New Yorkers and the open-minded southerner are only friends and then, regardless of their age difference, even a couple. In marriage with the young woman Boris can better control his panic attacks, while Melody increasingly the style of language and ideology ( as Pseudo- atheism and nihilism ) her husband takes over, but it loses neither its naivety nor its vitality.
A year later appeared on Melody's mother Marietta surprisingly, abandoned by her husband. Since she disapproves of the marriage of their daughter, she keeps trying to marry off her daughter with a younger man. At the same time it is introduced in circles Boris, emancipated rapidly, may her hobby, photography, into a career and lives henceforth with two men in a ménage à trois. Your later emerging also in the Yellnikoffs husband, who now want to win back, is from this change initially shocked, but then discovered in a drunken bar talk with another unfortunate abandoned his own homosexuality and finds in his interlocutor a new partner.
Ultimately Marietta's efforts have been successful and Melody love actually in a younger man, which after some hesitation, she also admits Boris. This then is making a renewed attempt suicide: He jumps out of the window of his house, but lands on a passerby - a clairvoyant - to which he then builds a new relationship. At the end of the film so all the protagonists tied happy new relationships and celebrate New Year's Eve in Yellnikoffs apartment.
A special feature of this film is that Boris repeatedly used in the course of the story directly to the audience, which record the other characters with incomprehension: He can see through the fourth wall, his teammates, however, have only a limited, within a fictional view of things.
Reviews
Evan Rachel Wood, who plays the Melody, called the film in an interview as a " true classic Woody Allen, but still unlike anything that has made Allen so far ."
Background
Woody Allen wrote the screenplay in the early 1970s, with Zero Mostel was provided for the main role, however, died in 1977. Thirty years later, Allen grabbed the script again, so as to forestall a strike Screen Actors Guild in 2009, where he had to adjust a few contemporary historical references in his own words.
The production costs were about 15 million U.S. dollars. The rights for the U.S. market has bought Sony Pictures Classics. The studio had already acquired the rights of Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999).
It is also interesting that the director Woody Allen himself, married to a much younger woman, the adopted daughter of his ex-wife Mia Farrow, Soon- Yi Previn - here is an autobiographical parallel to the film plot. Locations were Manhattan and Queens. This is the first film Whatever Works since Melinda and Melinda (2004), Allen has turned back to his hometown of New York.
The theatrical release in Germany took place on 3 December 2009; the Delphi Film Theatre in Berlin showed the film on the occasion of his 60th anniversary already on 3 November, the cinemas in the Hackescher Markt already on October 30.