Whatever Works (2009)

Larry David starts Whatever Works chatting over drinks with his buddies before he bursts the bubble and starts talking about the audience ("What, you guys don't see that whole crowd of people out there that's watching us?") and to the audience. In what resembles something like Woody Allen mensching in A Feast of Love, or a meaner and crankier House M.D., retired physicist Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) reveals himself to be a cynical curmudgeon who no longer believes in much of anything and considers all other humans to be "submental idiots" and "inchworms." (IMDB has piles of great quotes, by the way.) In a moment of charitableness, he takes in a hungry 21-year-old Mississippi girl, Melanie St. Ann Celestine (Rachel Evan Wood), who has just arrived in New York and he helps her start a life in the big city. He starts rubbing off on her and she begins to have feelings for him so they become one of the strangest "odd couples" you could meet. Meanwhile, the girl's mother and father look up their long-lost daughter, move to New York, and make major changes to their former Bible Belt mindsets. In a sea change if not a feeding frenzy of searching for love, everyone in the ensemble cast essentially proves Larry David's premise that all life requires to be happy is "whatever works." This is relativistic anathema to people of faith but he makes an entertaining contrarian point. I like this movie even better than Abby & Ira. 4.5 stars.