Unmistakably minor effort from Woody Allen, despite throwing in our faces an older-man-younger-woman relationship. (Take that, make of it what you will.) The older man is diplomatically not Allen himself, but an Allen surrogate, Larry David, in the role of a neurotic misanthropic hypochondriacal self-acclaimed “genius,” once considered for the Nobel Prize in physics, who peppers his speech liberally (or perhaps we should say intolerantly) with epithets like “moron,” “cretin,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” “zombie,” “mental midget,” “inchworm,” and “earthworm.” Allen has long exhibited a tendency towards intellectual snobbery, but he has never before let it so boundingly off the leash. (“Let me tell you right off,” the protagonist addresses the camera directly, “I’m not a likable guy.”) And so, notwithstanding the mask of the surrogate, that’s thrown in our faces as well. David, unlike so many Allen actors who end up sounding like Allen impersonators, proves to be a strong enough presence to escape Woody Allen if not strong enough to escape Larry David. The Larry David, that is to say, of Curb Your Enthusiasm, slight discrepancies aside. With his rapid gravitation to a raised voice, he refreshes Allen’s writing in much the way the British accents refreshed it in Match Point or the Spanish accents refreshed it to a lesser degree in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A new mouthpiece, a new set of pipes. And the judgment about the unmistakably minor effort deserves a caveat. The minorness of Allen’s efforts has become, besides a regular feature of them, a major part of their attraction. He is no longer out to set the world on fire. He is just out to keep the candle lit. With Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, and Ed Begley, Jr. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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