New York curmudgeon Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David, left) takes in Melodie St. Anne Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young woman from Mississippi, who quickly falls in love with him in the Woody Allen film Whatever Works. (Maple Pictures)

It’s a Woody Allen movie, so when the blond girl in the striped knee socks and short-shorts curls up on the couch next to the grumpy old guy, the only possible response is: Oh my, is he going there? Is Woody Allen going to confront head-on the antediluvian horndog reputation that has trailed him for years, even before the Mia-Soon-Yi scandal, back to the May-December romance of Manhattan (1979)? Well, kind of.

In Whatever Works, Woody Allen uses Larry David as his proxy, which is not exactly controversial casting.

In the middling comedy Whatever Works, Allen uses Larry David as his proxy, which is not exactly controversial casting. David’s persona, known to us from his TV creations Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, shares Allen’s misanthropy but none of his struggle. David arrives cheerfully – California-lly – at the centre of the hollow universe. But Allen truly mourns the lacuna at the heart of life, even as he laughs at it.

Physically, Allen and David are two peas in the pod of aging Jewish curmudgeons, each sporting knobby knees and chaotic hair. David plays Boris Yellnikkof, a New Yorker who was once – as he is prone to pointing out – considered for a Nobel Prize in physics. Still, the meaninglessness of the universe, etc., is too much to bear, and a few years ago he tried to jump out the window of his nice uptown New York apartment. Now he’s a failed suicide with a bad limp living – eww – downtown.

Boris spends his days kvetching epistemologically with his man-friends at the local café. His rants are unceasing, and mostly unfunny. In the movie’s first moments, he directly addresses the audience with: “I’m not a likable guy.” It’s a kind of self-evident truth, like the Dalai Lama saying, “I’m a bit even-keeled.” We get it. Boris berates everyone who crosses his path, name-calling with G-rated schoolyard originality: “inchworms,” “mental midgets,” “microbes.” (All this size talk, Boris — what would Freud say?) He teaches chess to children, then attacks their mothers for giving birth to the kinds of “cretins” who can’t play chess.

Being unlikable isn’t Boris’s problem; audiences will follow many a jerk if he goes somewhere interesting. But Allen builds his monster and doesn’t know what to do with him.

For a few years, the perils of making unprofitable movies forced Allen to shoot in Europe. Freed from New York, or his fantasy of it, he had to up his game and find new forces to animate films like Match Point and the sexy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But back in a stiff, stagey New York, Allen seems like a foreigner in the city he made famous. Although shot elegantly by Harris Savides (Gus Van Sant’s cinematographer), this New York is unrecognizable, generic, less like New York than like a soundstage of New York (perhaps even Toronto as New York!).

In the Woody Allen film Whatever Works, no one is spared the tirades of Boris Yellnikoff -- not even chess-playing youngster Enid (Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman). (Maple Pictures)

It’s an old observation, but Allen’s comprehension is off, too. The idea of a cheap, dingy “downtown” apartment is riotously funny to any non-millionaire who has suffered the indignity of apartment hunting in the West Village. Some of this awkwardness must stem from the fact that Allen wrote the script in the ’70s and then updated it, awkwardly stuffing a couple of Barack Obama jokes in Boris’s mouth.

Apparently, the jokes sit well with 19-year-old Melodie St. Anne Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, displaying a good sense of silly). She’s an alleyway waif just arrived from small-town Mississippi looking for a place to stay, and Boris takes her in, spreading his existential fury; it’s Pygmalion with knishes. That Melodie falls in love with him is the funniest thing in the movie — but heh, heh, the heart wants what it wants, as Allen famously said in defence of his affair with his partner’s daughter.

The ick factor in Whatever Works could be overlooked if it were in service of something funny. But the relationship is even too distasteful for Allen, who plants it defiantly at the centre of the film, then backs away completely from its sexual side. There’s nothing between the pair to suggest a love story any more romantic than Tuesdays With Angry Morrie.

The laughs – well, chuckles – are in the margins. Patricia Clarkson plays Melodie’s churchgoing southern belle of a mother, who arrives in the den of iniquity that is New York and has a total urban transformation in a few short scenes.

Allen’s faith in New York as a place of freedom and self-invention separate from the rest of America – an island off the coast of America, as Spalding Gray put it – is genuine, but it feels almost like parody: here’s the medicine the rest of small-minded, ridiculous America needs, a prescription handed down from on high in New York, the only place that matters. I don’t think anyone will enlist Woody Allen to mediate the ongoing red state-blue state cultural wars.

If you are an Allen freak – and I fully admit to a lifelong fascination – his movies begin to blur, and the archetypes he employs feel like Boris’s chess pieces, moved from film to film. And so you yearn for the better versions: the better Boris would be Max Von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters, grumbling at the television about pro wrestling (“If Jesus came back, he’d never stop throwing up!”). The better Melody, with her Betty Boop voice and animal sexuality, would be Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite.

But film to film, the Allen philosophy remains the same. Boris articulates it thusly: “Filch what happiness you can. Whatever works.” The familiar refrain in the mediocre package makes the film a footnote, a microbe. Allen has come home, but it’s no homecoming.

Whatever Works opens June 26.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.