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Woody Allen (left) and Larry David on the set of “Whatever Works.” Photo by Jessica Miglio, Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Whatever Works
Yes, Woody’s back, back picking at a bad spot in the Big Apple, in what I reckon is his 40th feature film. In 2005 Woody Allen abandoned his beloved Manhattan to make “Match Point” in London. Now, after some hits and misses overseas, he is back home testing relationship comedy in that testy city. One big difference: his stand-in this time is another kind of narcissist, Larry David (opens July 3, rated “PG-13,” 92 minutes).

Allen, when not a lead in his films, usually offers one character whose manner mirrors his own halting, neurotic persona. Examples of this doubling include an anxious John Cusack in “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), the unlikely Kenneth Branagh in “Celebrity” (1998), or, most recently, Will Ferrell channeling him in “Melinda and Melinda” (2004). Here, the chemistry is interesting: Allen’s alter ego is another bespectacled, jumpy, opinionated New York Jew, but with a twist. He has grafted some trademark Allen mannerisms onto the quite different stalk of the character so clearly delineated in Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” series.

It’s a bit confusing at first. You think you are seeing David just imitate Allen, the fussy New York intellectual gadfly. Then you realize Allen is writing lines for David, which the latter could have written for himself. Where Allen is neurotic, David is misanthropic; where Allen is self-deprecating, David is boastful; where Allen is sly, David is caustic. They sound the same, but Larry David, as Boris Yellnikoff, is a scold and a curmudgeon (yellnikoff he does!). In his movies, Allen, looking inward, might contemplate suicide because of his own inadequacies, whereas here, David, looking outward, wants to die because humans in toto are “a failed species.”

The plot of “Whatever Works,” is familiar from other Allen works and serves mainly to give Boris a chance to vent about his life and the fatuous lives of others. Boris, a quantum physicist whose first wife (Carolyn McCormick) is “too right” for him, abandons home and work only to fall into a liaison with the Mississippi waif Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), whom he houses, teaches and eventually weds. She grows, then grows beyond Boris when a younger man, Randy (Henry Lavill), appears, and frustrated Boris ends up with a woman he literally lands on in a suicide attempt.

Throughout, Boris – often breaking the fourth wall by addressing the audience – both ridicules the vapidness and cruelty of man while ultimately offering his own rather halting philosophy, i.e., just go ahead and do “whatever works – as long as you don’t hurt anybody.” By the way, Larry/Boris as a brilliant quantum physicist is about as believable as the ditz Diana Richards is as a nuclear scientist in the 1990 James Bond film “The World Is Not Enough.”

Is any of this funny? Not funny enough, I fear, since the sourness of “Whatever Works” dampens most laugh-out-loud prospects. One humorous element that the Boris character lacks, for example, that David’s character shows in “Curb”: the latter’s utter cluelessness and inadvertent self-mockery, the source of most of the yucks in that HBO series. The character who garners the best laughs is Melodie’s mom, Marietta, played smartly by Patricia Clarkson. A God-besotted Southerner concerned about her daughter in the big city, she succumbs all too readily to its pagan charms and becomes part of a goofy ménage a trois.

The film will indulge, if not strictly amuse, Woody Allen fans because of the many familiar devices. A standard one is the ingénue shiksa falling for the much older man (Allen’s perpetual wishful thinking). Here young Wood – 21 at the time of filming (and a sweet presence she is), falls for David, 61. This kind of creepy connection has been offered by Allen before, perhaps never more awkwardly than in “Everyone Says I Love You,” where Allen was the object of Julia Roberts’ lust! Other familiar touches include the older man educating the benighted young woman, the delight in old movies and classical pop songs, the wispy, off-hand nature of love, and the collective old-lover’s get together at the end, with a finale here reminiscent of “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

These elements may not make you love “Whatever Works,” but they will bring you back to Woody Allen territory you once knew and may have missed.

DC in the Movies
A new motion picture now in town offers ample Washington material. It’s “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” but this Smithsonian is a very different enterprise from the one on the Mall. It is, of course, a fantasy, so no one should go expecting a realistic portrayal.

Though the audience learns in passing that the Smithsonian is really 18 different entities, the film quickly ignores the institution’s diversity and stages the action in one multifarious building. The action seems to start at the Castle, but once inside, there appears a chamber with a fanciful window that looks like a medieval chapel. The same building, it seems, also contains a “deep storage” facility right under the Mall!

Moreover, in running around this mystical museum, lead Ben Stiller runs right into what looks like the National Gallery – technically, as all good Washingtonians know, NOT a part of the Smithsonian. The reproduction of the rotunda area is a nice replica, but locals will be surprised to see its holdings. A major statue of Rodin’s “The Thinker”? I don’t think so. A wax figure of Amelia Earhart? Nahhh. Also, two iconic pictures grace the walls of the gallery (and even cutely come alive): Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Both renowned paintings, of course, but both in the Art Institute of Chicago!

The film does have one sequence actually filmed inside the National Air and Space Museum, but during action sequences (like Earhart flying the Wright biplane inside the museum), the film has to resort to special effects. And, speaking of special effects, there are some surprising ones, like Honest Abe stepping out of his memorial to trod the Mall, and – a personal favorite – the lead characters, jumping from their Technicolor world right into the famous Alfred Eisenstadt photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-E day in New York – and themselves melding into a black-and-white 1945 world. Lovely stuff.

However mixed up it is, local filmgoers and their families (it is rated PG) should be amused by how it plays with our treasured museum complex.

Films on the Hill
The principal film for July is “Love Thy Neighbor” (1940), a lively throwback to classic radio days, in which comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen continue their famous on-air feud on the big screen. Also starring Rochester and a luminous young Mary Martin as Allen’s niece, it will be shown on July 18.

On July 24, “Lady of the Pavements” (1929) will mark the second in a series of late silent films directed by D.W. Griffith. Set in 19th century Paris, the story follows the romantic travails of a Prussian aristocrat (William Boyd) betrayed by his unfaithful fiancée. The next evening, an extravaganza by Cecil B. DeMille, “Fool's Paradise” (1921) will be shown with lead Conrad Nagel, a WWI veteran who is torn between a cantina dancer and a French singer.