Yet such openness was new even to this indulgent part of town. Odder still was the occasion: the after-party for the premiere of Limitless, the big-budget thriller about a pill that lets you access 100 percent of your mind. What audacious devotion to theme! Plentiful drugs at a drug movie party!

Alas, the high procured from these pills was nothing you couldn’t get from a lollipop. (The contraband turned out to be gumdrops.) The crowd would have to make due with a lesser intoxicant: fancy tequila drinks, which would probably be the last thing to render your mind power limitless.

The Observer’s substance intake began with one glass of white wine and one tumbler of Johnnie Walker Black. Nothing illicit there. But his interest had been piqued. He wanted the industry secrets. Which uppers, downers and other fun stuff do the stars use to enhance their brains?

The Observer edged into a back corner and spotted the movie’s pusher himself. Hey, Bradley Cooper! Have you ever tried any drugs that have let you use 100 percent of your mind? Like, Adderall? Or speed?

“Sorry, I can’t talk right now,” he said, pointing to a woman to his left. “Here, this is my mom.”

It seemed best not to interrogate Mr. Cooper in front of his dear mother. Luckily, in a nearby booth was another luminary: James Lipton. He was seated behind the Coopers’ table, a half-eaten plate of Buddakan specialties pushed aside in front of him. He was all Lipton—the goatee, the eyeglasses, the eyebrows.

James, The Observer asked. The drugs. Does he do them?

“I’ve never taken anything stronger than aspirin,” he laughed. “How’s that for square?”

Had he seen Limitless?

He had. And, having seen this film, he knew that, in the film, there is a drug that allows you to use one hundred percent of your mind. Would he ever try such a drug?

“I’d think twice about it,” Mr. Lipton said. “I like to think that I’m usually using 50 percent of my mind.”

On the other side of the room stood cast member T.V. Carpio, who declined to talk about drugs, fictional or otherwise. She preferred to talk about sex.

“The writer told me that, to avoid the R rating, we’ll take out all the sex scenes,” Ms. Carpio explained. “But the director said, ‘They will see you fucking like in real life!’”

Good to know! (At that point, The Observer had added a glass—two glasses?—of Champagne to his total substance intake).

Next up was Patricia Clarkson, in red, sitting legs crossed by the ballroom-bar precipice. If it were available, would she care to sample some 100 percent mind-enhancing movie drug?

“I want the drug, bwa-ha-ha-ha!” she told The Observer.

Is there anything she’s tried that’s come close?

“I’ve never done drugs, of any kind,” she said. “Except I guess alcohol. But a drug that would make me as brilliant as all of my brilliant writer friends? Yes.”

Well, Ms. Clarkson, Adderall comes close, and speed works for some people …

“No, if I did speed or whatever my heart would leap,” she sighed. “I have the highest metabolism. Oh, no, no, no.”

She thanked The Observer—“It’s so cute that you know who I am!”—and he returned to wandering around. Reader, go ahead and add one of those dumb tequila cocktails to the drink count.

The Observer craved more anecdotes of depravity. Surely, there must be someone who’s gone on a pill bender or two. Oh, right. The DJ.

“I took Adderall all of college, it was nuts,” said Cassie Coane. “Wait—Adderall lets you use 100 percent of your mind?”

Well, no.

“But yeah, I love Adderall,” she said. “Adderall’s the best.”

The most memorable interaction of the night, however, was the first. Jason Bateman stood on the stairs when The Observer approached him to ask about his drug use.

“Dude,” he said, his face a bit contorted. “Dude. I don’t know. I—”

At this point, the first of his public-relations assistants approached The Observer, and escorted him away. 

“That’s totally disrespectful and inappropriate.”

Baffling. A second public-relations assistant approached The Observer.

“Did you see the screening?” he asked.

No, The Observer had not.

“Well, if you had, you would know that nine people in the movie died from the drug.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

This one was intended as a showcase for juggernaut John Cena, the pro-wrestling champion-turned-action-figure hero, self-made Muscle McGurk, chain-mail fashion model and sometime rap singer often referred to as "Dr. of Thuganomics." Ms. Clarkson plays, of all things, his estranged and understandably distraught mother. As the matriarch of the Oklahoma Chetley family, she can't get over the death of her husband, a college wrestling legend who was killed in a car crash for which Mr. Cena, as her oldest son, Mike, feels guilty. Mike, also a wrestling legend, survived the wreckage, but turned to booze, violence and cheap floozies, leaving home and breaking his mom's heart. Ten years later, his 15-year-old kid brother, Cal (Devon Graye), a skinny geek who is nothing like the other Chetley men, heroically joins his high-school wrestling team with the hope that it will somehow reunite his miserable, mixed-up family. Like the doofus kid in Breaking Away, Cal prefers Italian opera to the gym, but he decides to devote himself to the sport, and, like Brandon De Wilde searching for troubled older brother Warren Beatty in John Frankenheimer's All Fall Down, hops on a bus to find him. His goal is to enlist Mike, whom he hero-worships, to be his trainer so he can compete in the 135-pound weight class. Mike is amused and confused by this aesthetic squirt who doesn't have one chance in hell in the bone-crushing world of wrestling, but he reluctantly agrees to teach Cal things like offense, defense, speed, leverage. You know, stuff determined to prevent audiences from yawning but doomed to fail. While Mom paces and wrings her hands with worry, Mike shows the kid the ropes, but he won't go to his matches because of the memories that still torture him whenever he sniffs a tube of Ben-Gay. Can Mike stay out of jail long enough to slay his personal demons and come home? Will Mom learn to overcome her pain, anger and loss? Will Cal beat the odds, grow biceps and beat up the school bullies who have been the bane of his existence? Will the courage and can-do sweetness of a good kid teach all of the Chetleys to resolve their differences and become a loving family again? Will the Cineplex run out of popcorn?

There's not much tension or suspense waiting for the answers. It's all been done before. Cal is the Billy Elliot of wrestling. John Cena is to serious acting what Lady Gaga is to serious music, making it easy for young Devon Graye to turn a sports-and-redemption movie into a coming-of-age flick, stealing every scene. A kid who would rather go fishing with a mysterious riverbank loafer (Danny Glover)--who turns out to have played an important role in his father's past--Cal turns from a scrawny beanpole into a Men's Health cover in ways I found hugely unconvincing. Weathering the testosterone overflow, Patricia Clarkson works her magic in an honest, homespun manner, eschewing self-indulgent furrowed-brow mother expressions and all traces of self-pity. But Mel Damski's follow-the-dots direction and the flaccid screenplay by John Posey (a former Newsday sportswriter who also plays the wrestling coach) that resembles an after-school TV special conspire to turn her into wallpaper. Along the way, we are treated to take-home talismans to live by, like "The smell of the mat never leaves you" and "Losing is better than quitting." Legendary is a soap opera with steroids.

rreed@observer.com

LEGENDARY
Running time 107 minutes
Written by John Posey
Directed by Mel Damski
Starring Patricia Clarkson, John Cena, Devon Graye, Danny Glover

2/4

One by one, the films from last year's film-festival circuit are arriving at last. The wonderful and versatile character actress Patricia Clarkson is subtly enchanting in Cairo Time, a Canadian film set in Egypt about a slight but heartfelt romantic interlude between a modern New York career woman and a courtly, old-fashioned Muslim, at a time of political tension that writer-director Ruba Nadda conveniently overlooks. It's not a perfect movie, but its minor weaknesses are outweighed by its major strengths: understated feelings and values and a welcome subtlety all too rare on screens today.

Cool and pale as lemon juice on ice, Ms. Clarkson plays Juliette Grant, a New York magazine editor who arrives in the feral heat of Cairo to visit her husband, a U.N. diplomat, only to find that he has been detained in Gaza on an urgent peacekeeping mission. The man assigned to take her sightseeing and protect her from ennui is Tareq Khalifa (Alexander Siddig), her husband's former security officer, a handsome and sensitive English-speaking Muslim who has now retired from the diplomatic corps to run his family's profitable coffee business. Escorted through the sights and sounds of the bustling city, Juliette is first just grateful for Tareq's courteous attention to a bored and lonely foreigner, and welcomes the companionship. But as the hot days glide into starry nights, an intense attraction develops between the tourist and her guide. She beats him at chess, providing him with a new respect for the intelligence of women. She accompanies him to a wedding in Alexandria and meets an old girlfriend he broke up with because she was a Christian, gaining new insight into his traditions and regrets. It takes a long time, but emotional undercurrents finally intensify and sparks fly, fueled by unexpected feelings of mutual respect. Will the restrained, 40-something American wife and the refined Arabian bachelor with Old World manners and a formal attitude toward women challenge their separate customs, convictions and religious values, and take a fleeting affair one step further? The tension is palpable, but the film is too subtle to lead you in the direction of clichéd passions. It all leads to a logical and sensible conclusion. No lives are shattered, but at least two people who are sealed against the world have felt a stirring in their hearts.

Small caveats: Director Nadda eschews any real hints of anti-Americanism in Cairo today and all possible terrorist undertones in a country of largely unfriendly exotic dangers that render it an unsafe region for women alone, almost as though Cairo Time means to be nothing more than a travelogue promoting tourism. But let it be said that the tours Tareq conducts of the ancient city casbah, the brown Nile at sundown and the awesome Giza pyramids lit by the moon are worth the price of admission-not to mention the sweet abundance of Ms. Clarkson's talents and the alchemy between the two stars. The character development is almost as unfocused as their unrequited love story. Both characters are just too damned polite. As good as she is, Ms. Clarkson doesn't have much to do. For a workaholic, she never seems to do any work. In fact, nothing much really happens at all, but never mind. What emerges is time pleasantly spent with a slice of life that examines a romantic détente between two cultures. Like smoke from an Egyptian hookah, the melancholia lingers.

CAIRO TIME
Running time 90 minutes
Written and directed by Ruba Nadda
Starring Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig

3 Eyeballs out of 4

Canadian director Ruba Nadda didn't have that problem with Cairo Time. Ms. Clarkson appears in almost every single frame of the ethereal love story, which had its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. In the film, Clarkson stars as Juliette, a Canadian magazine editor who comes to Cairo to visit her husband, who works for the U.N. After he's detained with work, however, she's left alone in the city with only Tareq (Alexander Siddig), her husband's long-time friend, to keep her company. As you can no doubt guess, longing glances and much sexual tension ensue.

The Lost in Translation comparisons are unavoidable, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Ms. Nadda, like Sofia Coppola, turns her host city into a character onto itself and allows slight touches and facial expressions to do the talking of 50 soliloquies. What makes Cairo Time so truly wonderful, though—besides a score from Naill Byrne that will haunt you long after the movie ends—are the two leads. Ms. Clarkson imbues Juliette with a sense of nervous apprehension and awakening wonder, while Mr. Siddig uses a slick and Clooney-esque charm to cover what is so obviously a broken heart. These two star-crossed potential lovers are truly made for each other, if only for a million and one reasons telling them that they're not. The stakes feel higher than in Lost in Translation and, as such, it makes the denouement resonate much more.

One of the more fascinating and discerning actresses in the current cinema, New Orleans’ own Patricia Clarkson is always worth watching. Even when she’s wasted in small, inconsequential roles in Woody Allen movies, she stands out. Making every minute count is one of her particular skills, and that knack is doubly appreciated in a dull, pretentious muddle like Blind Date. An unnecessary remake of a dreadful 1996 Dutch film by Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a religious nut who objected to the way he portrayed Islam in one of the small films he was so fond of making, the new English-language version of Blind Date has been written and directed by Stanley Tucci (who also stars in it) for reasons no rational person can explain. It was shot in seven days in Belgium and runs 80 minutes. Nothing has improved it one iota.

Mr. Tucci and Ms. Clarkson play an estranged (and strange) couple trying to pick up the pieces of their marriage after the death of their daughter, who narrates the action from beyond the grave. And the action, such as it is, centers on a series of “blind dates” in which the two grieving parents place personal ads in the paper, then meet each other as strangers, playing a number of different roles they invent for each other’s amusement. The ads change, but the man and woman always meet in the same claustrophobic bar, where Mr. Tucci sometimes acts as a bartender and other times mounts the stage in a magician’s costume and does clumsy tricks from a first-grader’s magic book. The newspaper ads separate the rendezvous tableaus, none of which add up to anything much. Responding to “Serious Reporter Seeks Aggressive Woman,” Ms. Clarkson shows up in the bar and throws a drink in Mr. Tucci’s face while he takes notes on a steno pad. “Blind Man Seeks Sighted Mate” leads to much hobbling about between bar stools, poking her with a cane. The scene is pointless, but at least it makes her laugh. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they ride around the dance floor in a miniature fun-fair bumper car and he calls himself Maria. They can only deal with their pain when they play fictional characters. The things they cannot discuss openly or honestly with each other as themselves come easier when they’re pretending to be somebody else. Since neither character is ever explained or examined with any real insight, the viewer ceases to care early on. The overriding effect is paralyzing tedium.

I watched this thing on one of those damned DVD screeners with the word CINEMAVAULT strung across the middle of the screen for the entire 80 minutes—an annoyance that almost obliterated all chances of enjoyment. Seeing it in a theater, you might find it more bearable, but I doubt it. Neither star needs acting lessons, but this movie is so inert that it’s less about acting than coping. Stumbling through so many scenes that go nowhere, Mr. Tucci is sleepwalking, but Ms. Clarkson still manages to be mesmerizing. Her choices are human and full of surprises, and the way she breaks up her sentences in little punctuations keeps you riveted. Unfortunately, there’s no thrust, no edge and no drama in any of it. Such a lack of conventional narrative makes it all look improvised. The final personal ad in Blind Date, placed by Ms. Clarkson, is called “Woman Seeks Peace.” She brings a gun. You wonder why it took her so long.

rreed@observer.com

On the face of the Woody Allen canon, Whatever Works is a zit. I once wrote that Woody Allen on a bad day was better than everybody else on Sunday. Too many bad movies later, I don’t know where he is on Sunday In Whatever Works, he comes home after frittering away his time in Europe, but doesn’t really bother to show up at all.

The first thing you hear is Groucho Marx singing “Hello, I Must Be Going.” It serves as the theme of a flip-flop movie that shifts gears more often than a bankrupt Chrysler. To some, all great ideas are based on the premise that people are basically decent beneath their flaws, but to Larry David’s Boris Yellnikoff, an unpleasant, aging Jewish curmudgeon and failed has-been physicist with a look of terminal colic, everyone is a fully developed A-hole. His philosophy is “Whatever works.” By his own admission, he’s not likable, and this is not the feel-good movie of the year. Omega 3’s, pelvic sonograms, fresh fruit and veggies, gyms, blogs, technology, retirement portfolios, family values, eggs from free-range chickens—to Boris, they’re all diabolical rip-offs invented to make life more miserable and pretentious than it already is. Boris is a metaphor for Woody Allen (who would have been a great improvement over Mr. David in Bermuda shorts), and the movie is nothing more than a stand-up comedy routine that suspiciously resembles a Rodney Dangerfield act. Boris’ ultimate, tasteless talisman to live by: “A black man got into the White House; he still can’t get a cab in New York.” Boris is so cynical and obnoxious that he makes Ebenezer Scrooge sound like Tiny Tim.

Enter a homeless Lolita from Mississippi named Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), who talks him into letting her sleep on his couch. Boris is just full of cheer (“Thin nonsmokers die, too”), but this little Daisy Mae from Dogpatch feeds him crawfish and greasy ribs, endures his panic attacks and marries him. Suddenly, inexplicably, he starts enjoying life. How I wish I had started enjoying the movie. No such luck. It’s as charmless as Boris, and never produces a genuinely unlined Botoxed brow until fate knocks on the door in the form of her drawling, neurotic mother (Patricia Clarkson). When she wants some fun, Boris suggests a visit to the Holocaust Museum. In the contrived tangle of events that lead to a preposterous finale, Boris jumps out of the window and lands on top of a psychic (Jessica Hecht), who falls for him while he’s visiting her in the hospital. Daisy Mae falls for a neat, clean-cut preppie with a real I.Q. (Henry Cavill), and her bullish father (Ed Begley Jr.) from a deer-hunting Red State falls for a … man!

The point of Whatever Works is that the universe is made up of nothing more than meaningless blind chance, and no matter how ridiculous everything gets, there are some meaningless blind chances that could only happen in New York. Larry David is one of the puzzlements of contemporary show business. He’s ugly, bald and as funny as Alzheimer’s; his baffling popularity on TV’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is bad enough, but on the big screen, he leaves me cold as a frost-free ice machine. But what do I know? I hated Seinfeld, too. Nobody plays Woody Allen better than Woody himself. Why hire a sad, boring substitute with one expression and pasty knees? Whatever Works is a dubious idea at best, but when nothing works, it’s time to throw out the script and move on to omething that does. Many things go awry here, and some of them could have been fixed, but fixing a Woody Allen movie would be like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube after it’s already been squeezed.

rreed@observer.com

“I’d always been a fan. … I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,’” said Mr. Allen. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it. And not just the comedy, which I expected, but all the other things he had to do which required acting and emotions and being touching and all that—he did that, too.”

“I didn’t even know I was on his radar, to tell you the truth,” said Larry David, 61, with utmost seriousness, speaking from Los Angeles a couple of days later. “I’m very surprised about that. When you hear that Woody Allen is a fan of yours … ” He paused. “It’s surprising.

“I gave him every opportunity to get someone else. I was kind of uncomfortable. I was out of my comfort zone,” he said. Then he laughed. “Of course, the comfort zone is not very big! I take one step to the right and I’m out of my comfort zone.”

So, a new Woody Allen movie starring Larry David filmed right here in New York City. Could there be a more deep-fried mix of talent, comedy and neuroses? For most of us, Woody Allen is as quintessential New York as the Chrysler Building. Many New Yorkers grew up with a vision of this city spun by Annie Hall and Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, where the skyline always twinkles and romance lurks around every limestoned corner; where brainy, nervous men charm young and naïve beautiful women in grand prewar apartments lined with bookshelves; where there are country weekends with lobsters to chase and always—always—love to find and fail. And then there’s Larry David, another Brooklyn boy made good, co-creator and writer of Seinfeld, which defined New York all over again in the ’90s, with its exquisite, endless examinations and sweating of the small stuff—soup Nazis, being master of the domain, parking garages and puffy shirts. Since his 1999 HBO special Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the still-airing series that followed, he’s made performance masterpieces of excruciating situations. The news that he was to star in Mr. Allen’s latest had some rubbing their hands in anticipatory delight, others sharpening their knives, all anxious to see if Mr. David could pull off the ultimate as a Woody misanthropic paradigm.

(This is harder than it might seem … remember the disastrous Jason Biggs turn in 2003’s Anything Else? Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity?)

But we’ll go ahead and say it: Whatever Works is Woody Allen exactly as you want your Woody Allen to be. It’s witty, dark, poignant, zany and hilarious, and showcases a New York filtered through the Allen lens as we’ve never seen it before. Meaning, forget the Upper East Side! This film creeps through the crooked and narrow streets of the Lower East Side and Chinatown, knishes to hanging chickens.

And as for Mr. David … he indeed pulls it off and then some playing Boris Yellnikoff, a half-suicidal almost–Nobel Prize–winning physicist who suffers from night terrors (he wakes up with strangling death screams) and minor OCD (he washes his hands and sings “Happy Birthday”—twice!—in order to kill all the germs), then tosses it all away (literally) and considers the majority of Earth’s population too stupid and meaningless to even deal with.

The Woody angel who enters this time—the beloved innocent woman—is Evan Rachel Wood as Melody, a teenage Southern runaway who manages to entrance Boris in spite of himself. A May-December romance (familiar to all Allen devotees) follows with its inevitable complications, but darker than usual—heartbreak ensues. Don’t ask! Filling in any and all gaps is a terrific supporting cast including  Patricia Clarkson, Michael McKean and Ed Begley Jr.

Whatever Works is as nimble as his smaller comedies but still feels like a big Woody film, in the Hannah dimension. It also seems to carry the well-tempered glow of late Woody Allen with a well-satisfied view of late life and with few illusions. And a great surmounting romantic joke. And somehow Larry David of all people has the ideal astringency for a Woody Allen protagonist, cutting through the plot without giving up the layers of sentimentality and darkness that make the soot of his New York romances.

MR. ALLEN SAID he originally wrote Whatever Works, his 39th feature-length film, with Zero Mostel (another great Brooklyn Jewish comedian and Mel Brooks’ original Max Bialystock from the Producers) in mind for the role of Boris. But Mostel died in 1977 and Mr. Allen put the script in a drawer. He said that when he decided he wanted to film something in New York again after shooting his last four films in Europe, he dusted it off and updated it. 

The title refers to a rather pragmatic philosophy when it comes to our treacherous human hearts, namely that if you should find something or someone in your life that makes you happy, go with it—regardless if it might appear, at first glance, to be all wrong. “I do believe in that strongly myself,” Mr. Allen said. “As long as you’re not hurting anybody … or doing anything that’s causing any mischief or hurting anyone or anything awful, that whatever works to get through your life is fine. All the nonsense about what one should be doing and shouldn’t be doing and what’s quote unquote appropriate according to what I call the appropriate police—it’s nonsense. It’s a tough scuffle through life,” he said. “A tragic situation. Whatever gets you through—as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else—is fine.”

Whatever Works has its fair share of dark corners, but audiences may be pleasantly surprised at its ultimately sunny rom-com message. It’s strange to think that Mr. Allen wrote this film decades ago, long before we learned far too much about his own private romantic struggles (though its doctrine is an easy leap from his infamous “The heart wants what it wants” remark to Time magazine in 1992 amidst the Mia/Soon-Yi scandal).

“I think my philosophy has been consistent over the years, and it appears either persuasive or idiotic depending on how good the film is,” he said. “If I make a film and the film itself works, then I feel people come away saying, ‘Gee, the philosophy here makes sense.’ And if I make a film where I’ve struck out and I’ve made bad artistic choices and the film is not good, then they think, ‘His ideas are stupid and narcissistic and irrelevant.’ But really the ideas have always been the same … it’s just that I’ve failed artistically.”

The concept of things seeming right versus being right has indeed popped up in Mr. Allen’s films before. But Whatever Works might be the only film that so plainly and deeply examines it. At the start of the film, Boris looks around at his comfy life, his just-right uptown apartment and appropriate spouse, and realizes he feels miserable and trapped enough to die (something he manages to fail at, too). He trades it all in for a ratty bathrobe, teaching chess and holding forth in cramped coffee shops—often while looking straight into the camera and speaking to the audience directly. Yet happiness is lurking for him, even if he doesn’t know it, in the most unusual of places.

“This happens all the time,” said Mr. Allen. “You meet somebody, you have a relationship with that person, and, on paper, it just seems completely logical and right and it is right, and yet for some inexplicable reason, you go and gravitate toward the person who is consummately wrong for you, and makes your life into a hell. And that still attracts you more. And had you settled for the person who was right on paper, you indeed would not have been happy.”

Back in Los Angeles, Larry David considered the “whatever works” philosophy as it might apply to him (in fact, he took a night to think about it before phoning The Observer back with his thoughts).

“Even though something might be right on paper, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work,” he said. “Whereas something very odd on paper could be perfect, and something about that person makes you feel good. That’s the most important thing,” he said. “Usually for me, those are the first people I reject. The ones that make me feel good. Why should I feel good when there are women who can’t stand me and whom I can’t be myself around? Those are the ones I want.”

This sort of sentiment is exactly what we’d expect to hear from Mr. David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where he plays a bizarro version of himself. But consider this: If that persona, the one we think we know (“What I’m playing on TV is not really me,” he said. “Although I’ve said many times that I wish it was”), is now, in Whatever Works, playing yet another cinematic version of Woody Allen, we’re now into Lost-levels of confusion when it comes to the line between performer and reality. Where are we? Is Boris, with his crushing anxieties and disgust with the human race, a representation of the director himself?

“I don’t know Woody that well, but it’s pretty obvious it’s at least a bit of some of who Woody is,” Mr. David said. “He must have seen something in me to make a passable stand-in for him.” Mr. David said he had brought Annie Hall home recently for his 14-year-old daughter to watch. “She couldn’t get through it because [Woody’s character] reminded her too much of me. She can’t watch me, either. As far as I know, we’re the only two people she’s said that about.”

ONE COULD SPEND hours listing the similarities between Mr. Allen and Mr. David (both New York–born, outer-borough Jewish comedians with wicked dark streaks, a certain amount of performative self-hatred plus self-regard, sharp pens, significant intellectual chops and even sharper tongues), but the differences are more interesting. For example, though both men may be called pessimists, the ways in which they are pessimistic are quite contrary.

“I think [Woody’s] probably more of a pessimist about the big picture,” Mr. David said. “The hopelessness, meaninglessness of it all—the blackness of eternity—those questions. Whereas I suspect I’m probably more pessimistic about the smaller things: The relationship won’t work out, Obama will lose, the Yankees will lose, the movie will bomb—things like that. People won’t watch ball games with me because I’m so pessimistic. I’m no fun to be around.” (But what happens when Obama does win? “I know! My whole world goes topsy-turvy. I still can’t believe it,” he said.)

Case in point, perhaps, was Mr. Allen’s response to what The Observer had felt was a pretty straightforward happy resolution in the film. “I’m always so didactic in everything I do, and so heavy-handed, I wanted it to be clear that even though it was a happy ending, we all still remain in this dreadfully tragic predicament, and a tragic life, and that the story did end with a certain amount of temporary happiness,” he said. Um, really? “I did want to portray Larry’s take on life as closer to reality than other people. He might seem like a complainer, a malcontent, like a misanthrope, a cynic, a nihilist—whatever words you want to impute to him, but there’s a great deal of sad truth to his perceptions. And I wanted to make that very clear at the end of the movie.” 

Larry David laughed when later told of his director’s assessment. “I think generally it feels that there are moments of joy, but at the bottom it’s doom and gloom. O.K., so there’s a big pool of doom and gloom and every now and then you can swim up to the surface like a dolphin and get some joy and then you go back under.”

“I have what I call, what I would perceive to be, a very realistic view of life, whereas other people criticize me all the time as being, you know, cynical and misanthropic and nihilistic,” Mr. Allen said. “You know, I don’t think I am! It’s possible that I am and I have a blind spot. But I don’t think so. I think my perception of it is correct—that it’s a tragic event and it takes real improvising and real luck and real work to get through it.”

By all accounts, the shoot for Whatever Works was a pleasant one. Mr. Allen directs long, difficult takes, but keeps civilized hours, and for the New York natives like Patricia Clarkson, it was a chance to walk home from work. Michael McKean, who plays one of Boris’ few friends, had worked with Mr. Allen in the 2004 Atlantic theater production of Secondhand Memory. He said Mr. Allen seemed particularly energized and happy. “He seemed to be in good spirits,” Mr. McKean said. “He had a great relationship with his DP and the rest of the crew. The thing with him is that he knows what he wants, that’s key. And he had a really good group.” Mr. McKean said he would take Mr. David and Ms. Wood (recommended for the role by Mr. Allen’s wife) to Katz’s deli for late-night corned beef.

“He writes these really beautiful notes,” said Ms. Clarkson, of receiving her second Woody Allen script. “Like with Whatever Works—it’s always something funny like, ‘If you have something better to do, I’ll understand.’ And then I open the script and it’s this divine part.”

And when she says notes, she means notes! No emails for Woody Allen. “It’s gone past me,” he said, of the Internet age. “I don’t have a computer, I don’t have a word processor or any of that stuff. I’ve never been able to work on instruments. I don’t get gadgets at all. I have a typewriter and still, after all these years, have great trouble changing the ribbon on it.” He paused. “I know I’m missing something. I know when friends Google instant information or things”—he keeps a Webster’s dictionary close by—“it just seems so futuristic to me! I’m still plodding and doing it the other way. I don’t say that proudly, or like it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I’ve just never been able to make the transition.” 

Mr. Allen said he always tells his actors to paraphrase him. “If you’re going to ask for a divorce, ask for a divorce,” he said. “Do it in your own words.” Mr. David, an excellent improviser by nature, wound up wanting to stick to the script, though he said he had the urge in the beginning of shooting to try to change things around. “I’ve been speaking my own words my entire life,” Mr. David said. “It started to get a bit refreshing to get someone else’s words in my mouth.” (Did he ever, The Observer wondered, start to feel comfortable in his leading role? “Maybe the next-to-last day,” he laughed. “Yeah, on the last day I was like, you know what? I thought this is pretty easy!”)

MR. ALLEN SAID that now that he’s finished his film—he’s done the foreign prints, he’s completed the DVD color corrections—he’ll never see it again.

“I made Take the Money and Run in 1968 and I’ve never seen it since, or any of the others.” But surely he’ll attend the glitzy Ziegfeld Tribeca Film Festival premiere on the 22nd? Mr. Allen said no, he never actually sits through the films. “I go in and walk on the red carpet … smile … answer the questions, and then I sit down and the second the lights dim, I’m out. I’m at a restaurant with my wife and we have dinner. And then I go to the party afterwards and go back into phony social mode where people are exchanging enormous insincerities. They’ve hated the film but they’re saying, ‘Gee, great film. Great film.’”

You might expect this kind of gloom from Boris, but not from Woody Allen! 

“I can’t ever say I’ve been happy with my films,” he said quietly. “It’s always the same story: I set out to make them and I’m setting out to make, you know, the greatest thing ever made. Citizen Kane or Othello. But by the time I’ve finished, when the compromises set in, and I’ve screwed this up artistically and I couldn’t get that actor and I didn’t have enough money for this, and I guessed wrong on this joke … by the time I put the picture together, I’ve gone from being sure that I was going to make the next great American masterpiece to just praying that it won’t be an embarrassment.” Mr. Allen sighed. “So I find myself in the cutting room, scrambling, taking a moment out of here and sticking it there. Putting a piece of music in here, and patching up something there, and hoping that I’ll just breath and survive. I’ve already abandoned all integrity and all hope of an uncompromising masterpiece.”

By reaching out to Larry David in Whatever Works, Woody Allen has added something to his canon that he might never have gotten on his own. He hired the one working comedian who could put a knife edge on the usual adorableness of the Woody Allen interpreter. Whatever Works may not be an uncompromising masterpiece, but it’s the astonishing collaboration of two uncompromising comic masters of the romantic and tortured New York psyche.

And it works.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, from the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the short novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, enters a metaphysical region between life and death that few films have ever dared to explore. Ms. Coixet and Mr. Meyer have managed to capture much of the bittersweet humor of Mr. Roth’s brilliant confrontation of old age, his own included. The director and the scenarist are aided in no small measure by a very accomplished cast headed by Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, Mr. Roth’s hyper-articulate literary alter ego, who ranges in age here from 62 to 70. Kepesh is first seen in the film on the Charlie Rose show (with real-life Charlie Rose on hand) ruminating about the first libertarian colony in America, Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount, a fur-trading settlement about 30 miles northwest of the repressive God-fearing Puritan colony of Plymouth. At Merry Mount, the settlers and the Indians commingled in every sense of the word, and staged pagan dances around the maypole until Governor Endicott of Salem sent the Puritan militia under Miles Standish to tear down the maypole, and arrest Morton for sacrilege. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about Morton and the maypole, and its neglected place in American history as the first manifestation of American hedonism—and the last until the sexual revolution in the 1960s, at least according to Mr. Roth and Professor Kepesh, who says so in an aside to the latter’s cataloging of all his campus conquests. In one fleeting image, the campus on which Kepesh cavorted is none other than that of my own beloved Columbia University. And since I am an aged professor on that same campus, it is understandable that I feel that Mr. Roth is speaking for me, if not directly to me, when he writes as Kepesh: “Can you imagine old age? Of course you can’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image. No image. Nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur.”

When Kepesh first saw Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz) in his class in “Practical Criticism,” he was 62 and she was 24. Mr. Roth painstakingly describes every detail of how Consuela was dressed, and every nuance of how she wanted to be seen. Outside the door of his classroom is a sign advising his students to report any incidents of sexual harassment. Hence, he makes it an ironclad rule never to make contact with any of the female students until after the final grades were posted. When he meets students in his office, the door is left wide open. Then at the end of the term, he gives a large party in his spacious apartment, one to which he makes it a point to invite Consuela. Eventually, he finds himself in a position to have Consuela unveil the marvelous breasts that have inflamed his erotic senses.

I doubt that this movie with all its sustained contemplation of a woman’s beautiful body would have been possible even a decade ago. The literary property would have been stamped “unfilmable” from the outset. Yet I cannot describe the effect of all this frontal assault as particularly erotic. It is not Ms. Cruz’s fault. She brings a very precisely defined humanity to her role. Perhaps that is the problem. She is somehow too real, too existential, and, ultimately, too vulnerable to be viewed coldly and callously as a desensitized pornographic stimulus.

Also, Mr. Kingsley evokes too much aging angst as Kepesh for us to enjoy his lustful adventures. Indeed, Kepesh is but the latest of Mr. Kingsley’s aging academics, represented most recently by his eccentric psychiatrist in Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness. It is my new policy to try and not give the plot away when I decide that the reader may derive more pleasure by discovering it unaided by the critic. But it suddenly strikes me that anyone who has read Mr. Roth’s source material will already know what lies in store for Kepesh and Consuela. Is my new guilt-ridden policy on narrative exposure thereby unfair to my more literary readers, who might prefer me to evaluate all the plot twists in the story?

In this respect, let it be said that the film’s adapters have hit all the crucial plot points of the story, though scrimping on the densely subjective texture of Mr. Roth’s exquisite prose. I do not agree, however, with some of the negative comments about the alleged miscasting of Dennis Hopper as Kepesh’s best friend, George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. I have no idea how you can possibly miscast a poet in these dismally unpoetic times. It takes someone with a motorcycle hoodlum’s hubris to keep cranking out poetry for an increasingly print-shunning populace.

Patricia Clarkson has one striking scene as Kepesh’s longtime girlfriend, Carolyn, in which she screams at Kepesh over his perceived infidelity to their unsanctified union. I can’t imagine such a scene taking place for the greater part of American film history. Yet one feels the fragility of all relationships in this one outburst of non-marital sexual jealousy.

Peter Sarsgaard also brings something extra to the faintly ridiculous role of Kenny Kepesh, David Kepesh’s 42-year-old disgruntled son, who still has not forgiven his father for walking out on the family when Kenny was only a little boy. The seemingly endless father-son exchanges do much to redeem the film’s chief protagonist as a being who can look past his own frightening old age to console his son with patience and tenderness in order to prepare him for the inevitable trials to come.

If I recommend Elegy to my readers, it is not as a licentiously escapist entertainment, but, rather, as a soberingly eloquent expression of what our lives are all about, whether we want to think about them or not.

asarris@observer.com

“A commitment to cinema—over a long period of time—as an art form,” the 42-year-old director said, was the hallmark of the festival, which for the first time was presenting his work, the film Married Life, starring Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper and Rachel McAdams.

“To me, that’s something that’s been lost in the independent movement, which is something that I came out of, which is to think of film in the same context as a painting, or a photograph, or a ballet, or the Met, or whatever else it may be that is artful in cinema that is significant in itself,” Mr. Sachs said.

The occasion was a dinner held in honor of the directors whose films are being showed at Lincoln Center during the festival’s 17-day run, and Mr. Sachs was about to tuck into an omelet.

But no sooner had Mr. Sachs’ indictment escaped his lips before he seemed to think a little better of it. His film, after all, is hardly independent of Hollywood—whether or not it deserves to be viewed in the same context as a painting, etc.

Married Life stars an Indie goddess but also a former James Bond, and is a Sony Pictures Classics release (in the United States) of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment presentation of an Anonymous Content/Firm Films production. (International sales handled by Kimmel International of Beverly Hills.)

“I think that there is a way in which the corporate arm of Hollywood has co-opted the independent movement,” he said, “but at the same time, the independent movement needs the economic industry which is Hollywood moviemaking.”

“So I think it’s a process and it morphs over time just as any other art form does. There’s a period of evolution. You can’t stop the evolution, you can just respond to it.”

Mr. Sachs’ response is an adaptation of British crime novelist John Bingham’s Five Roundabouts to Heaven, which he has reset in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1940’s.

The director Brian DePalma also had a film at the festival for the first time—Redacted, it’s called.

He was to be found in the restaurant’s back room, where he stood in the seemingly endless line for one of those omelets and tiramisu. The 67-year-old said he used to frequent the festival as a Columbia physics student, and prefers to go to festivals when he hasn’t got any movies in them.

“Usually it has the pick of all the other festivals, so you see a lot of films that have been sold, fine films that were in all of the festivals earlier,” he said. “Going to a film festival when you’re promoting a movie is not a lot of fun because all you’re doing is press all the time. You don’t get a chance to see a lot of things. So, I go to film festivals from day one to the end of the festival—I do that in Toronto; I do that in Montreal; I’ve done it Berlin; I’ve done it in Cannes. I just go to see movies, because I love seeing interesting movies from all over the world,” he explained.

Anything really interesting coming up?

“I’ve seen a lot of good films, but you know… Last year, I saw a Bruno Dumont film called Flanders I thought was incredibly striking, that stayed with me for over a year now.”

We’ll look it up!

At a recent lunch at Michael's in honor of Barbarian Invasions director Denys Arcand, actor Bob Balaban, wearing a black pinstripe suit and sporting a short platinum-blond hairdo, humbly replied: "First of all, I'm not very famous, so for me to say, 'Oh, Bob Balaban supports somebody,' this is not terribly exciting. But I'm not sure all the time but that people aren't turned off when actors support them."

The actor, who is perhaps best known for his roles in Gosford Park, A Mighty Wind and Best in Show (and his directorial effort with The Exonerated), has some firsthand experience, too.

"I show up in a lot of places and they scream out at my little group there, 'Go home, left-wing actor people! Go back to Hollywood!' They scream that at you!"

But that hasn't stopped actress Kathleen Turner, producer Quincy Jones and musicians James Taylor and Moby from supporting Senator John Kerry, or Martin Sheen, Melissa Etheridge or Michael Douglas from rallying behind Governor Howard Dean when he was still in the race. And while she may not have been his downfall, Madonna's endorsement of retired Gen. Wesley Clark didn't seem to give him much of a leg up.

So far, Senator Kerry's Hollywood helpers haven't given him any trouble, but will more stars lead to more votes? Mr. Balaban doesn't think so.

"People think that all Hollywood people are left-wing radical liberal stupid people," he said. He'd be voting for Senator Kerry, he added. "I tend toward the Democratic side-although I know some Republicans who are wonderful, obviously. But if Kerry wins the nomination, I would be very happy to vote for Kerry." Did he think all celebrities were far left-wingers out to scream? "No," he said, "but there are some-just like there's Rush Limbaugh."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Trumped Up

The macho grandstanding between two of Manhattan's biggest real-estate developers, Donald Trump and Related Companies chief executive Stephen Ross, for bragging rights over Columbus Circle -and its coveted Central Park views-took its latest turn on Feb. 11 at the annual Douglas Elliman Brokers awards banquet, held at the Pierre. Mr. Trump delivered the keynote address in front of some 750 brokers during the annual breakfast fête, which toasts the firm's top bread-winners.

With Time Warner's official opening on Feb. 5 garnering a slew of media coverage, including a cheery write-up of the Whole Foods supermarket by former New York Times food critic William (Biff) Grimes in the Dining Section on Feb. 18, Mr. Trump took time in his keynote speech to remind the members of Manhattan's largest brokerage that his building outclasses the $1.7 billion upstart from Mr. Ross' Related Companies across the street, according to those who attended the event.

"He was terrific and refreshing. Donald talks about himself-what do you expect him to talk about?" said Elliman's president, Dottie Herman, when asked about Mr. Trump's keynote speech turned 1 Central Park West marketing spiel.

Neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Ross returned calls for comment.

Another broker who attended the event put it more simply: "Donald made it pretty clear that Time Warner was in the second row, and his building had front-row seats to Central Park. It was pretty crude, actually."

In November, Mr. Trump launched the first salvo in the battle for Columbus Circle supremacy when he dangled a sign off the roof of the Trump International Hotel and Tower at 1 Central Park West, his jet-black homage to all things luxurious, that read: "See, your views aren't so good, are they? We have the real Central Park views and address! Best wishes, 'The Donald.'"

-Gabriel Sherman

Mother Love

Discussing the merits of the "zipless fuck" appeared to come easily for authors Erica Jong and Edmund White, two of the panelists at a Feb. 13 lunchtime debate on love sponsored by This Week magazine.

The phrase, coined by Ms. Jong in Fear of Flying, describes an ideal sexual exchange in which nothing but pleasure is the objective. It's "rare as a unicorn," she wrote.

Fellow panelist Farrah Fawcett seemed to think that was a good thing: She used the panel as an opportunity to come out as a prude-and a proud one at that.

When asked by moderator Harry Evans (who revved up the discussion with questions like "Why don't women cheat more on their men?") if she'd ever kissed a woman, the aging Angel looked confused. "I kiss my mother on the lips," said the amber-hued Ms. Fawcett. She paused, sounding a little skeeved by the thought. "I mean, no."

Ms. Jong let drop casually a short time later that of course she had relationships with women.

When Ms. Fawcett later was asked if she'd ever contemplated the utopian pleasures of the aforementioned "zipless fuck," she balked again. "No. Absolutely no. I feel more old-fashioned," said the 57-year-old actress, who's repertoire reportedly includes little more sensational than dating her seriously junior fellow actor Tom Green. "I just feel that I had and have a more traditional upbringing. You know, Corpus Christi, still close to my parents, grounded."

But what about the 60's, The Transom wanted to know? She was there, right? That poster, the one that launched a thousand … ?

As she was gently tugged away by a female companion, Ms. Fawcett chuckled, "I was in art school and then I went to L.A." The Transom was left to figure out the rest on our own.

-Shazia Ahmad

I Saw It in the Window And I Couldn't Resist

E! Entertainment fashion critic Leon Hall can't stop gushing over Pieces of April Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson-so much so that he stood out even at a party organized to fête the actress by her friend Julianne Moore, at the surprisingly kitschy library of Soho House on Feb. 17.

"Her body is flawless. She's got a Scarlett O'Hara body," Mr. Hall kvelled in his trademark nasal bellow. "And you know what? It's all hers. I don't know if I've seen a body that good, even on an 18-year-old girl, in a long time. But she's tiny. She can't just go and take a dress off a rack. She has to have something made on her."

Ms. Moore organized the event, at least according to the Julianne Moore–letterhead invitation, to honor Ms. Clarkson's "incredible performance" in April, which garnered the actress a "well-deserved and long-overdue" Best Supporting Actress nomination from the Academy this year.

Ms. Clarkson may yet be angling for another, higher distinction at this year's Oscars. Mr. Hall-who voted Ms. Clarkson "best dressed" at this year's Golden Globes for wearing a blue ombré Bill Blass gown "made on her" by designer Michael Vollbracht-thinks she's set a red-carpet trend for wearing idiosyncratic, personalized designs.

"Everybody is going to be more specialized. People are going to wear clothes that are made on them," said the cherubic Mr. Hall, an oversized desk lamp looming behind him. "I don't think you are going to see a mass of Versace. I don't think you are going to see two dozen Valentinos. I think you're going to see some things from designers you don't know."

Mr. Hall said that even Nicole Kidman-"who at the [Golden] Globes looked really horrible"-could use a touch of individualism. "It's about the person and then the dress," purred Mr. Hall. "I think for too long it's been about the dress and then the person."

But Mr. Hall may be just a little bit biased. After all, he is smitten. "I've covered the red carpet for 15 years, and this is the first time that someone took the trouble to call me a day later and say thank you," said Mr. Hall about Ms. Clarkson's reaction to his gracious remarks on Melissa and Joan Rivers' Fashion Police. "When I was a little boy-and I always wanted to be in fashion, I really wanted to be a designer-I thought women always looked like she looked that night."

-Jake Brooks

The Transom Also Hears …

… That burgeoning young actress Claire Danes is adding another role to her résumé: college dropout. The strawberry-haired starlet, who entered Yale University in the fall of 1998, left the school sometime during her junior year to star in films like The Hours. "I never graduated!" she boasted from the front row of the Zac Posen show at Bryant Park, where she held court in a sparkly cowl-neck gown. Now she tells The Transom that she has walked off the set for good, as far as her education is concerned. "I actually went back to New Haven last Saturday for Pepe's Pizza, and for a hamburger from Louis' Lunch," she laughed, naming two popular campus eateries. "So I go back for food, not degrees!" Isn't she afraid of mad cow? "No, not at all. And I'm not afraid of being undereducated, either!" Ms. Danes has been keeping a low profile since rumors began to swirl that actor Billy Crudup had abandoned girlfriend Mary-Louise Parker (who was 8[1/2] months pregnant at the time) to take up with Ms. Danes. Over the last few weeks, she and Mr. Crudup have been spotted canoodling at various locations and slurping dessert at Serendipity 3, but Fashion Week marked her first major public appearance. Though Mr. Crudup was nowhere in sight (Ms. Danes arrived with an unidentified woman with whom she chatted and giggled throughout the show), we asked the actress if there were any rumors about herself that she'd like to clear up. "No, none," she shot back with a smile. "Not a single one."

-Noelle Hancock

… That the Feb. 11 funeral for the renowned classical string-instrument dealer Jacques Français at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home was a mixture of grieving and beautiful music, with a little bit of careerist schmoozing thrown in. Français, who died at 80 on Feb. 4, was an expert on Stradivarius instruments, and his memory was honored with a string-quartet performance of Borodin's Nocturne.

Leaving the chapel, an old music-loving friend of Français' second wife (there had been three in all) approached one of the musicians to say how moved she was by the music. Introductions were made. "Sono Italo-Americana," the music lover, an Upper West Side actress, said jauntily. "Really?" said the cellist, who asked if she'd be at the breakfast following the service so they could continue their conversation. Sure enough, he eagerly approached her when they arrived at the reception. "So, you said you're with Sony?!" he said.

When she corrected him, he swiftly turned on his heel.

-Anna Jane Grossman