Part Four: Gena Rowlands to Evan Rachel Wood

Gena Rowlands
Another Woman (1988)

Another Woman is one of Woody Allen’s lesser discussed works but by no means a sub par achievement. In fact his quiet, nuanced character study is one of his finest directorial works and scripts. It’s elevated even more by the brilliance of Gena Rowlands, who gives an understated and resonant performance.

In Another Woman, Marion (Rowlands) is introduced through her voice-over and Allen’s characterization. She is dressed in layers of earthy neutrals, hair done up in a tightly-braided French bun, in “drab contrast” to her friends and family. As she begins work on her book, she overhears the next-door therapy sessions of a young woman named Hope (Mia Farrow). The thin, fragile, emotional, and high-pitched voice of Farrow is a contrast to the steely, deep tone of Rowlands. Throughout, Allen gives us many close-ups of Rowlands, who has a beautiful, strong face like the women of Ingmar Bergman’s films (an obvious influence here; Sven Nykvist was also his cinematographer) that can register shades of regret and sadness.

As Marion becomes more introspective and sadder, Rowlands’ gait slackens. Fidgety at a recital and visibly uncomfortable when a former student tells her what an inspiration she once was, Rowlands shows Marion as a bit rattled from listening to Hope. She gives us downward glances, a few nervous ticks.

The dreamlike movement of the film explores the emotional territory of Marion’s past and present. In a flashback scene, Gene Hackman, a former lover, is shown kissing Rowlands on the eve of Marion’s impending marriage to a cardiologist (Ian Holm). Rowlands looks happier, less stuffy—her hair in a loose ponytail. In one scene, she finds herself at her brother’s home, wide-eyed, in disbelief. He recalls her critiques of his writing as “overblown, maudlin, too emotional.” This is the antithesis of Rowlands and her character, but also a sense of vitality that Allen suggests as too-lacking in Marion’s own life.

In a quiet moment, Marion reads her mother’s favorite Rilke poem and in voice-over, describes the page’s tear stains from her mother. After reading the poem, Rowlands perches her glasses on her head, fist on cheek, then looks off, eyes welling, thinking of the line, “You must change your life.”

In a dream sequence, we see the contrasting style of Sandy Dennis when she performs a staged scene as Marion. Dennis uses hand gestures, moves around a bit more, and verbalizes her thoughts instead of withholding them (“there isn’t much passion in this relationship anymore”). In both instances, Allen gives Rowlands the space to react, as she gives us more sad, regretful downward glances.

With Rowlands, we often see a woman who wants to weep, as Marion describes, but the tears won’t come. Her dream of her first husband who killed himself (Marion refers to him clinically as “not a suicide”) triggers an argument with her husband. She finally raises her voice, yelling at him (“There was a time when we were dying to be together.”) Here, Rowlands lets loose a bit, and also shows how she towers over him (which reminded me of the visually awkward pairing of Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains in Notorious).

When she overhears Hope describing Marion as a “sad woman” who has “alienated everyone her”, Rowlands finally breaks and sobs. She goes home to confront her husband from a wing chair—suddenly more like Hope in one of her sessions—telling him passionately that she feels sorry for him, that he has been just as lonely as she has been.

In the coda, once she breaks away from her husband, the film gradually gets warmer. In displays of compassion we hadn’t seen before, Rowlands puts an arm around other characters. Her studio looks less cold. She flips through Hackman’s novel, finding the passages about her, and here, Allen shows them together in a montage sequence—her happiness, her loose ponytail back again. He describes Marion as “capable of intense passion, if she’d just allow herself to feel.” This is a poignant contrast to the scene where an unsettled Rowlands read the Rilke poem. Here, Rowlands closes the book, removes her glasses. Her voice-over: “I felt a strange mixture of wistfulness and hope. And I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.” Rowlands looks up, the sun behind her.

Rowlands is best-known for her daring performances in the films of her husband John Cassavetes. However her quiet, gracefully subtle work in Allen’s film shouldn’t be overlooked when evaluating the richness of her career. Like her performance, the theme music by Satie is regal, and elegant but also tinged with sweetness and vulnerability. Rowlands gives the camera and the audience “little gambits to seduce.”

Jeffrey Berg

Mira Sorvino
Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

“You know why I liked you from the start? Because I’m always attracted to losers. You’ve got no self confidence, I like that in a guy.”

— Linda Ash, Mighty Aphrodite.

Woody Allen has been plagued by criticism of his depictions of women throughout his career. Though he writes juicy roles that attract A-List actresses, in many ways the roles can be viewed in some quarters as incongruous and dehumanizing. Linda Ash, portrayed by Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite, is no exception.

To isolate Allen’s contradictory portrayals of women in his films it’s helpful to compare them as a motif to Death. It is this unknown that Allen cannot accept or understand, so he fetishizes it. Take Allen’s Alvy Singer in Annie Hall. Alvy is attracted to books with Death in the title, because he “has a pessimistic view of life.” But, despite his continual focus on death as a subject, his characters are paralyzed by fear when confronting it personally, rather than being able to accept it as inevitable. Women, like Death, are an objectified Other, always presented as a foil to the Allen character’s development.

In the pantheon of Allen protagonists, the most misguided misogynists are those who want to save whores. These Henry Higginses are simultaneously attracted to these women for what they perceive as their animal (almost innocent, childlike) sexuality, their classless uneducated behavior, and the purpose they offer the typically dissatisfied man, the opportunity to assume a superior role in a life where he is customarily powerless. It’s important to understand that the character’s motivation is not to help the disadvantaged, but to create a situation in which they can perceive themselves as altruistic and empowered. Lenny Winerib (Allen) is a tragic hero, complete with the standard tragic flaw of hubris. The only deviation from the tragic plot the heavy-handed incorporation of Aristotelian structure references is that the hero is ultimately successful, and via a deus ex machina, the outcome is comedic.

The character that Allen wants to help escape her life diverges from the more common female archetypes characterized in Allen’s catalog. While a typical misogynist dichotomy portrays women as “Madonnas” or “Whores”, Allen’s dehumanizing dyad runs more along the lines of an innocent, warm, accepting pupil versus a castrating, intelligent, cold, rejecting bitch. While the ingenue can appreciate Allen’s sensitivity and interests, the bitch is frustrated with his obsessions that eclipse practical concerns. Where the ingenue can love Allen simply, the bitch is moody, has changed, ”has her period.” (Annie Hall).

Mighty Aphrodite’s Linda Ash depicts both a unity and divergence between his two female types. Allen’s whores accept him like his ingenues and he can mentor them, but can also satisfy him sexually, like his wives (at least, in the beginning of their relationships).

Initially, Winerib finds Linda because she is the biological mother to his adopted child. His obsession comes out of marital dissatisfaction. From the beginning of the adoption process Lenny feels he has no control. When his wife Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter), tells him that they found a baby, Lenny adamantly disagrees with the idea. The very next scene shows the couple welcoming the baby into their home for the first time. Throughout the narrative, Amanda becomes increasingly removed from Lenny’s life, while making decisions with which he profoundly disagrees.

Because he’s feeling neglected, once Winerib meets Linda he rejects her initial advances, and tries to save her from her life as a prostitute, ostensibly for when his son meets her in the future. He cleans her up, extracts her from her relationship with her pimp by trading her for court side Knicks tickets, and introduces her to a nice boxer that is her mental and physical (but not moral) match. The boxer rejects her when he discovers her porn star past, while Lenny’s wife simultaneously leaves him for another man. Linda and Lenny, in a moment of vulnerability, fall into each others arms and conceive a child. This coupling somehow convinces Lenny that he’s really in love with his wife. Conveniently, Amanda comes back to him, and Linda is “saved” by the sudden appearance of a non-judgmental helicopter pilot who loves her despite her transgressions.

The film ends with a chance meeting, years later, between Linda and Lenny who are both unaware that they are respectively raising each others child. Though Linda has been saved by both Lenny’s attention to “make her feel special and change her life,” it’s also the pilot that transports her from her plight as a porn star and prostitute. Lenny, too, is “saved” from himself, and happy in his marriage. Ultimately, though the title character refers to Linda Ash, the movie is about Lenny’s transformation, and his ability to become an actualized husband and father. Like Annie Hall is not about Annie, Mighty Aphrodite is not about Linda Ash; rather, it’s about Lenny Winerib’s deliverance from himself.

Elizabeth Flynn

Maureen Stapleton and Elaine Stritch

Maureen Stapleton
Interiors (1978)

Probably the greatest actor on this entire list (says me), Stapleton simply owns every scene I have ever seen her play; her presence is always arresting and enveloping. Even in such middling fare as Cocoon and Airport, she was a scene stealer. Anyone who has seen Reds already knows this, or at least is aware that this woman could do an uncanny amount with very little, given a chance. The look she gives Diane Keaton when she sees her in the bread line in Russia holds more joy and despair than a week of soap opera scripts. However, I digress.

This consummate skill, suffice it to say, made her the ideal choice as the foil for Geraldine Page’s ice queen in that iciest of films, Interiors. Famously dressed in vivacious reds (to offset Page’s persistent beiges and taupes) – costumes were designed by that master of subtlety Joel I-am-actually-not-very-subtle-at-all Schumacher – Stapleton breathes life and effervescence into her scenes, bringing with her the only gasps of fresh air in what is an intensely stuffy film. In a movie that is all closed space, all walls and shut windows and, well, interiors, she is the breeze flowing through, waking everyone up. Indeed, before the film ends she will actually breathe life into someone. So, it isn’t all that subtle, but it works. As Sarah Vowell, among the cleverest commentators on whatever the hell she feels like commenting on summarized: “Geraldine Page is all beige this and bland that so her husband divorces her and hooks up with noisy, klutzy Maureen Stapleton, who laughs too loud and smashes pottery and wears a blood red dress to symbolize that she is Alive, Capital A.”

However, it isn’t just that she exudes confidence, charm, passion, and joie de vivre, but she is also powerful in her refusal (or is it obliviousness?) of the intellectual circles the other characters run around in. She is life, yes, but she is also low brow and simplistic in her tastes. (“She is a vulgarian!” shrieks one of her new stepdaughters after she crashes into a vase.) Since this is Woody Allen, after all, there are class connotations that come along with any traits such as these. Allen has always been prone to uncomfortable assumptions about the neuroses of the upper classes as compared to the carefree la-dee-dah of the working classes, and Stapleton’s key scene revolves around precisely this “truism”. As the sophisticated, artistic, and highly educated family discuss a play they have all recently seen, debating the finer points of the existential questions raised therein, and appearing for all the world not to have actually enjoyed any aspect of the thing (so caught up were they in the abstract moral issues it suggested to them), Stapleton deflates the whole thing with effortless sincerity. “I mean, to me, it wasn’t such a big deal… How do you know [what is the moral thing to do]? I don’t know. You just know, you feel it.” And, watching her, you know just what she means, because you feel it, too.

Stuart Henderson

Elaine Stritch
September (1987), Small Time Crooks (2000)

September is widely considered one of the low points of Woody Allen’s career. It’s one of his lowest grossing films, and production was a notorious mess because, dissatisfied with the results the first time around, he insisted on re-shooting the entire thing. Stritch seems, in retrospect, untouched by all of this. As a matter of fact, because Allen had brought her in to replace Maureen O’Sullivan during the second shoot, she had no idea that there had ever been a first. As Marion Meade quotes her in The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: “We were well into it before I found out. But what did I care?” Those words sum up Stritch’s persona. She’s brash, sarcastic and unapologetic. She’s also marvelously entertaining. All these qualities make her perfect as Lane’s celebrity playgirl mother Diane. Stritch gives off the no-nonsense attitude that everyone’s in it for herself and there’s a fine line between sinking and swimming.

In a movie full of melodrama, Diane stands out as a touch of light-hearted self-sufficiency. She may be the only likeable character in September, bustling about Lane’s summer house with an air of absent-minded self-absorption and dropping witticisms about everything from the guests set to arrive for a night of drinks to the handicapped vanity of her advancing age. She is flippant with everyone, even her daughter, but she is wildly successful in all her relationships. Diane’s charisma is her identifying trait and it makes her a foil to Lane’s morbid frailty. She charms the man of her daughter’s dreams the way that Lane never could, and she arrives at the house with one more in a series of husbands. Lloyd (Jack Raines) is benign and perhaps a bit goofy, but he is reliable and clearly down-to-earth, unlike Lane’s crush Peter (Sam Waterston), an immature and idealistic writer.

Stritch truly has led a storied and worldly life, and she carries off her role with a cheeky, jaded ease. Her career in the theater has been international and eminent: she was a leading lady for Noel Coward and Stephen Sondheim. It has also been, at times, very troubled as she struggled with alcoholism and the vagaries of life as a performer. She is now over 80, and she has cultivated her reputation as a survivor in her dynamic performances and in the autobiographical solo stage show Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. In that show she reveals that it was after the final day of shooting for September that she relapsed for the last time, nearly dying of an insulin deficiency caused by diabetes, which had only recently been diagnosed.

The dark side of the high life is never far from the surface when Stritch talks about her career, and the same is certainly true of Diane’s cavalier wisecracks. Her personal prosperity is off-set by her callousness about the crimes of her past and the rights of her children. In a stunning scene toward the end of the film she tries to contact a dead lover with a Ouija board and ends up in tears. What would ordinarily be a moving sequence is unfortunately watered down significantly by the abundance of earnest, confessional dialogue in September. Stritch nevertheless maintains a powerful presence throughout the film. Her smart, multi-faceted performance is one of the only dimensions of the movie that treats Allen’s theme, the ability to pick up and move on after a personal disaster, without getting too much bogged down in over-agonized reflection.

Dylan Nelson

Jennifer Tilly and Tracey Ullman

Jennifer Tilly
Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Volcanic, ribald, and just a little maladroit, Tilly has spent the last 20 years sketching character after character in some of the strangest, most off-the-wall projects Hollywood has gotten away with. Perhaps best remembered as one-half of the most infamous lesbian crime duo of all time in the Wachowskis’ sensational Bound, she gets her kicks out of playing killer dolls in horror sequels (1998’s Bride of Chucky) or evil queens in uncompromising auteurist experiments (Terry Gilliam’s Tideland). A collaboration with Woody Allen, then, comes across on paper like at best an impulsive experiment and at worst a really terrible joke; certainly the last two words one would associate with such a partnership would be “Oscar nomination”.

Bullets Over Broadway, Allen’s farcical examination of the unlikely intersection between theatre and organized crime in the Roaring Twenties, thrives off breaking as many rules as possible, and as such, Tilly’s abrasive, boozy, totally uproarious wannabe-actress Olive Neal doesn’t just work, she soars. A quirky, anomalous jewel in the Allen canon, Bullets over Broadway can be approached in numerous ways: with its wide cross-over appeal, abundance of belly laughs, and razzle-dazzle cast of actors rarely associated with Allen (the exception being Dianne Wiest, of course), it makes a solid case for the Woody Allen Film For People Who Don’t Like Woody Allen Films; however, as one of his last films to enjoy passionate and just-about universal praise, Bullets Over Broadway also represents the end of (or perhaps a brief journey back to) the Golden Age of Woody; a period in which critical acclaim was a given, not a frequently-elusive goal. Regardless, it’s certainly one of his funniest and most durable works, and it’s at its most confident and hysterical whenever Olive appears onscreen.

Tilly’s vocal and physical talents match her character deliciously well; her shrill squawk of a voice can make a throwaway jab at her maid (whom Olive incredibly seems to perceive as a rival) sound as absurd as her butchered delivery of the already-moronic dialogue from ‘Gods of Our Fathers’, the stage production on which the plot is centered. Her body language is even better: even when Olive is fluttering around in the corners of shots or behind other characters, she exudes a kind of manic, appropriately-nauseating energy; Tilly is aided in this endeavor by Jeffrey Kurland’s outrageous costumes, but one should not underestimate the amount of guts it takes not just to make, but to wear outfits made entirely out of pink feathers.

Olive is not a particularly likeable character, and Tilly knows better than to undermine Allen’s writing by overemphasizing her sympathetic elements, but she also pulls off a difficult paradox of keeping the audience invested and interested in Olive even as she becomes increasingly stupid and insufferable. In other words: Tilly gives us a whole world instead of a caricature, milking laughs out of nearly every second of screen-time, keeping Olive’s desires and fears and epiphanies and insecurities tangible without resorting to cruelty, and still operating as part of a greater ensemble. A total knock-out of an oddball supporting turn by an actress who knows “odd” better than just about anyone else.

Lee Dallas

Tracey Ullman
Bullets Over Broadway (1994), Small Time Crooks (2000)

Central to Woody Allen’s film work is the fact that he began his career as a comedian, and still essentially is one. His respect for jokes and joke-telling is evident in a film like 1984’s Broadway Danny Rose, where a group of comedians tell the story of an entertainer they knew, but really is evident in most of his films, in the way he works one-liners into dialogue. It’s also in his casting. He routinely casts comedians, even as characters that aren’t purely comedic. He appreciates the talent it takes to make people laugh.

By 1994, when Allen cast her in Bullets Over Broadway, UIlman was already an established TV comedian, first in her native UK and then in the US on the The Tracey Ullman Show, the variety show that introduced The Simpsons. Ullman made her name as a quick-witted comedian. Her place within the ensemble cast of Bullets Over Broadway, set in the ’20s New York theater scene, relies on that same quickness. Her character, Eden Brent, is one of a group of actors who each carry themselves in a larger-than-life way, hiding their inner feelings behind dramatic gestures and mannerisms.

Ullman plays this role to a hilt, entering the film with her little dog in tow, speaking quickly, throwing out niceties, laughing in a high-pitch, nervous way, and following up ridiculous comments with a laughed “just kidding!” She “has a wonderful vivacity”, the playwright (John Cusack) decides, as he was meant to. Her character’s entrance is contrasted with that of Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), the gun moll, untrained in acting, who makes all the wrong moves, awkward as most of us would be. Ullman’s character represents someone who has learned the ways of the theater world. When challenged by someone with an even more hardened theatrical exterior (Helen Sinclair, the role for which Dianne Wiest won her second Oscar, both for Woody Allen films), Brent breaks down, demonstrating the fragility we already sensed. Ullman’s physical habits feed our understanding of the character: her nervous hand motions, duplicitous smile, the way she plays at bashful by twirling in a circle at one point.

That ability to wrap a character’s story and personality in a colorful comedic personality was taken to a higher level when she was given a starring role by Allen in 2000’s Small Time Crooks. Seemingly playing against type as working-class New Yorker Frenchie, she’s really tapping into the chameleon-like characteristics of her comedy routines. Both Ullman and Allen are playing types out of our Hollywood imagination: lovable blue-collar buffoons, an ex-con and a former stripper trying to make their way in the world. The film jokes on their naiveté, tackiness, and discontent, but it’s the acting that turns these caricatures into people. Their quick back-and-forth, Ullman staying right with Allen comically, helps us with the lovable part, especially the way they laugh at each other and at themselves.

They seem like equals: in age (though Ullman is 20-plus years younger, in Allen’s world that’s close to equality), in sense of humor, in intelligence (both are dumb on the surface, certain the other one is dumber, but of course reveal a level of understanding and common sense, or at least goodwill, that the more educated around them don’t have), and in their position within the plot. The storyline is quintessential Hollywood — in short, mo’ money mo’ problems — but also quintessential Allen, in the way one half of a couple perceives that life could be better, tries to make a change, and in the process comes to see they were wrong, while spurring the other half to decide that they, too, deserve to have a better life. It’s Husbands and Wives, but with a happier result; comedy over tragedy.

Ullman’s place in the plot is key. It’s her emotional journey that the movie mostly follows. The way she and Allen act together, though, is what makes the most impact. Their reconciling at the end is among the more tender moments in Allen’s films. It’s the final of a string of similar moments between them, scattered throughout the film. A key one early in the film for its cinematic value is their conversation on a rooftop, against the setting sun, captured beautifully by Allen and cinematographer Zhao Fei.

“All that matters is we have each other,” is the film’s final sentiment, and it’s touching in the context of two fools who know they’re each others fools, and who sometimes manage to fool the foolers. It’s Ullman’s Frenchie who embodies this. The way she laughs at her husband (of 25 years) and his stupidity in a way that’s caustic but loving is a recurring action throughout the film, representative of its inherent kindness.

Dave Heaton

Dianne Wiest and Evan Rachel Wood

Dianne Wiest
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1996), Radio Days (1987), September (1987), Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

In the five films produced during her creative partnership with Woody Allen, Wiest displays decades’ worth of range: from naïve ingénue to imperial diva, from chirpy speed-talker to weary bystander, from prostitute to dame, from clotheshorse to close-cropped ghost, she makes character acting look like performance art.

Every actor is capable of changing their appearance to fit a certain role, but Wiest reinvents her own physical syntax, building entire characters out of head movements and entrances into rooms and exits out of vehicles. Her Oscar-winning performance as Holly in Hannah and Her Sisters runs on jitters, side glances, swipes at thin air, and amphetamine-fueled buoyancy; September’s Stephanie is a wounded animal, sober, slow-moving, washed out, strangely asexual; and the inimitable (and also Oscar-winning) Helen Sinclair of Bullets over Broadway operates on non-stop caps lock, every syllable and hand gesture aiming for the rafters, even when she’s alone in her own home. Throughout their ten-year period of collaboration, Wiest’s performances reveal no actorly agenda of her own, but instead a deep understanding of Allen’s various visions, be them Chekhovian experiments, nostalgic flights of halcyon fancy, or bawdy period crowd-pleasers.

Yet despite her innate malleability as a performer and the disparity of her roles, each of Wiest’s contributions to the Woody Allen canon brings it with a particular aura of creativity and romanticism quite removed from Allen’s own persona. The characters she plays are frequently anomalies in the Woody Allen universe because in general they are guided by, and often suffer from problems of, the heart instead of the head. The prostitute Emma of The Purple Rose of Cairo uses affection as a language; the reckless and passionate Holly searches for love and approval at the expense of her own safety in Hannah and her Sisters; Radio Days’ Bea yearns for true love even as the world around her grows increasingly stifling and unromantic. These characters are all also linked by their association with the arts: Holly is perpetually in search of her creative muse, struggling as an actress before hitting her stride as a writer; Bea is associated with music and the radio, in one incident suffering a spectacularly awful date due to the on-air shenanigans of Orson Welles; and Helen Sinclair is practically a walking, talking, bellowing ode to the irresistible glamour of the theatre.

Wiest may never have attained the ‘muse’ status of Diane Keaton or Mia Farrow, but the compassion and romance she imbues in these characters often serves as the perfect complement to Allen’s verbosity and neurosis. When Helen Sinclair, in despairing her fervent passion for script-writer David Shayne, howls out the line “Go, Scorpio, Go!”, you can practically hear Woody the Cynic chuckling behind the camera, amazed that he could dream up such an irrational and oblivious creature. On occasion, however, and often at the most unexpected times, Allen’s romantic side can get the better of him, and in these moments it’s Wiest who functions as the perfect conduit for his tenderness.

Mickey, Allen’s hypochondriac doppelganger in Hannah and Her Sisters, initially rebuffs Holly only to find himself drawn back to her years later. Her writing excites and inspires him, triggers something in his gut that he can’t articulate. Sure, she might like punk rock more than jazz, and has a spottier past than her sisters, but her vivacity is so refreshing, so unexpected, so new, that he just can’t help feeling drawn to her. Their blissful embrace closes Hannah and Her Sisters on a note so humane and optimistic, it completely disarms the audience, hitting them straight in the gut. It’s the moment that best encapsulates Dianne Wiest’s captivating power as a performer, and ensures that her creative partnership with Allen will endure for decades to come.

Lee Dallas

Evan Rachel Wood
Whatever Works (2009)

Melodie St. Ann Celestine lost her virginity behind a tent at a fish fry. This we believe as she tells her story to fourth wall-breaker/misanthropist/physicist Boris Yelnikoff, played by Larry David, on the steps of Grant’s Tomb and during their first-time tour of New York City. It’s Melodie’s bubbly, fast-talk attitude that carries us incredulously through Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. It is Wood, Melodie’s real-world persona, who, if she’s a right-minded person, probably feels a little stung these days, having presumably sat through and discussed at length at least one full display of her first foray into another one of Woody Allen’s neuroses.

Celestine is a character that viewers should find difficult to bear. It isn’t always her stock lilt or the film’s blocky scenes that inhibit Wood. In a New York Times review of the film, A. O. Scott brightly remarked of its caliber: “frantic action is not the same as acting”, and it’s true. Wood is hindered by the same rhythm. From Yelnikoff, she adapts dull distaste for life fatalism and moves out of her small-town Louisiana shell into a marriage with Yelnikoff, formed under the pretense of quantum mechanics, shared dourness, and outright silliness.

So here we have Evan Rachel Wood married to Larry David, living in NYC detritus (like a sharecropper, as Melodie’s mother tells us), and eating grits. It’s all quite ludicrous, which is fine, because we’re watching Wood in a Woody Allen film. She’s an indie darling of sorts, having given us Thirteen, Down in the Valley, and, among many others, King of California. The odd equation we find is that Wood is accomplished, Woody is accomplished, and yet, together, they form a bad nothingness more poorly dimensioned than one of Mr. Yelnikoff’s lectures on string theory.

Melodie St. Ann Celestine never develops in Whatever Works because she was never fully formed in the first place. Easy enough. Even when schemed by her mother into a relationship with a younger and more appropriate man, Celestine doesn’t take shape. She simply never was.

Celestine’s mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), compliments Wood’s character quite well. Both have a ruinous idiot-come-lately flair when their Southern inexperience should show us naiveté and capacity. When explained the nature of her character by the young man who, more than halfway through the film, seduces Celestine, she finds herself unable to quite place the assessment. “That sounds familiar…” she starts to say. Yeah, we say, it does.

Wood is an interesting actress. Her goody-girl demeanor was not an off-base choice for Allen. The character, were it of a film of the same ethos, with the same highfalutin, poser-postmodern concept, but written by someone else and without the ridiculous Southern belle put-on, played seriously by Wood, could maybe work.

Jason Cook