(2009) Outside a café in Greenwich Village, pontificating to three friends about this mindless, barbaric civilization full of gun- and family-values morons and idiots filled with misinformation and morality, expurgating corporate religion ("big money in the God racket") - though the original ideas of Christianity and Marxism were sound - "based on the fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent," Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a physicist who taught quantum mechanics and string theory at Columbia, indicating that he's "surrounded by microbes" (just consider that we've elected a black president who can't get a cab in New York City) while only he can perceive the big picture that human beings are a "failed species," sums up his pessimistic despair by saying: "Nothing comes to anything."

He tells his disbelieving pals about the movie audience watching them and then addresses us: "My story is whatever works as long as you don't hurt anybody." This brilliant romantic comedy is director/writer Woody Allen's matured masterpiece.

Crabby, aristarchian, misanthropic Boris, lacking charm or tactfulness, earns his living teaching kids chess; he's divorced after an extremely rational match (complementary interests, no children) with Jessica ("high IQ and low-cut dress") ended with his suicidal jump out a window (fall broken by an awning) and has a limp. Living alone, he suffers panic attacks and night sweats, until Melody St Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a "brainless little twit" who's run away from her home in Mississippi, begs for food and shelter.

Though she's "stupid beyond all comprehension," he allows her to stay to avoid her becoming "an Asian prostitute." While he shows her the city's sites - Grant's tomb and the Statue of Liberty - she confesses to having committed a sin, describing her out-of-wedlock, first sexual experience with the drummer in a band.

Melody develops a crush on Boris, who finds the entire idea preposterous to even consider attempting to Pygmalion the girl, their being so completely opposite in all respects (he's at least three times her age). Nevertheless, a month into their cohabitation, hearing her speak of others - such as the boy who took her out for a date - as "inchworms," observing her turning toward cynicism without losing her cheerfulness, he's reminded of how much love depends on luck ("an astronomical concatenation" of random events) and marries her.

A year into the marriage, after Boris puts Beethoven's Fifth ("fate knocking") on the CD-player for her musical edification, Melody's Southern-belle mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), raps on the door and enters what she takes to be a sharecropper's rattrap. Disapproving of her daughter's being "a nursemaid to a roach," Marietta schemes to have a handsome actor with a British accent, Randy Lee James (Henry Cavill), pry Melody loose.

Herself vulnerable, stupid, and abandoned, Mariaetta falls into the beds of Boris's friends Leo Brockman (Conleth Hill), a philosophy professor, and Hal Morgenstern (Olek Krupa), an art-gallery owner, who admire her "aesthetics of photography" as well as her curvaceous anatomy.

Having been exposed to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Melody, playing with chance ("mathematically impossible to be in two dreams at one time"), allows a kiss from Randy on his houseboat, leading to entropy of her marriage's metaphorical crockery. Love relations are transient, their expiration inevitable, Boris acknowledges: "The universe is winding down, why shouldn't we?"

When Melody's right-wing righteous father John (Ed Begley Jr) appears on Boris's threshold, repenting of his sins, he discovers that his daughter's an atheist ("You're praying to no one," says Melody) and his wife's a liberated liberal in a ménage à trois; in a bar, pouring out his grief by the glassful to Howard, a sympathetic stranger, he's told: "God is gay … He's a decorator."

Boris again self-defenestrates, landing on a woman, Helena (Jessica Hecht), a psychic who apparently didn't see this coming. It's all nothing more than "meaningless blind chance"; nonetheless, cosmic forces of attraction are at work, drawing together disparate elements into new configurations of stars and galaxies, so make the most of it.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .