‘THIS is not the feel-good movie of the year,” Larry David announces as he directly addresses the audience for four minutes at the beginning of Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works,” which got the Tribeca Film Festival off to a shaky start last night.
It isn’t the laugh riot of the year, either.
The Woodman’s return to New York after a four-year European sojourn finds him working very familiar territory much less fruitfully than in the past.
In some cases, it’s the very distant past — he virtually recycles the speech he gave Mariel Hemingway 30 years ago in “Manhattan.”
Woody’s sixtyish surrogate this time is David, a misanthropic, hypochondriac and misogynistic physicist named Boris.
After a failed suicide attempt, Boris leaves his wife, quits his job and moves to Chinatown, where he teaches chess and abuses his young students.
One night he encounters Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a 21-year-old former beauty contestant from Tennessee whom Boris offers shelter against his better judgement.
Though Boris sprays her with cynicism and a steady stream of insults, the ditsy Melodie finds Boris so charmingly brainy she eventually proposes marriage.
As if this weren’t incredible enough, this May-December couple is still married a year later when her mother (Patricia Clarkson) arrives and faints after one look at her new son-in-law.
That Mom will find her inner bohemian is as foregone a conclusion as her attending a movie at Cinema Village.
Woody has told interviewers he wrote this script years ago for himself and updated it recently.
Yes, there is a cringeworthy gag about our new president being unable to get a cab in New York, and an even worse one about Viagra. And he tries to show he’s with it by briefly throwing in a menage a trois, just like in his last film, the far funnier “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”
But few under 50 are going to get his reference to Texas sniper Charles Whitman (he’s the Binghamton killer of 1966). Some of the gags are even older, and only occasionally funny.
“Whatever Works” is not an unmitigated disaster, like the last film he shot in New York, the similarly titled “Anything Else.”
For starters, David is a more apt Woody stand-in than that film’s Jason Biggs, or Kenneth Brannagh in “Celebrity.”
But he’s not really an actor either. There’s a very, very fine line between Boris and “Larry David,” the character that David plays on his hilarious TV series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
The difference is that David is improvising his own lines on HBO instead of moldy clunkers written by a 72-year-old auteur.
Wood’s Melodie is initially grating, but she becomes more charming as the film goes along.
The acting honors belong to Clarkson, who digs into her severely cliched role with relish.
British actor Henry Cavill makes little impression as an age-appropriate waiter-actor who pursues Melodie, and Ed Begley Jr. has basically a one-joke role as Melodie’s uptight dad.
Boris explains the movie’s title: “In the end, our romantic entanglements are reduced to whatever works.”
Yes, that sure sounds like a paraphrase from “Annie Hall.”
It’s hard not to conclude that after a couple of more ambitious films he made in Europe, Woody has adopted the same sloppy philosophy to his filmmaking.
Young woman, old man, older jokes
Running time: 90 minutes.
Rated PG-13 (brief nude images, sexual situations).
Opens June 19.