Whatever Works

Quantity is no guarantor of quality, as anyone knows who saw the grim “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.’’ “Whatever Works’’ is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality. It feels like one of his lesser early plays or a New Yorker sketch padded to fill the contours of a feature film. And it confirms what the last decade of his movies has hinted at: The weakest part of any new Woody Allen movie is when Allen himself is onscreen.

In “Whatever Works,’’ that extends to Larry David, the actor cast as the director’s stand-in this time. He’s playing Boris Yellnikoff, a former Columbia University physics genius who has retreated to lower Manhattan and a bottomless sinkhole of cynicism, but in flailing hands and plaintive yawp, he’s all Woodman. On HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,’’ David gives self-serving bile a nearly heroic stature. Here he’s just a crank.

The movie’s ostensibly about what happens when this bitter pill takes in a stray: Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young runaway from Allen’s blinkered idea of the Deep South. Moving onto his couch and into his life against Boris’s better judgment, Melody’s a perky cheerleader gone bad and she absorbs her savior’s bleak pessimism like a sponge. He’s all irony and she has none; they’re attracted to each other like two magnetic Scotties. In short order they’re married.

No, it doesn’t make much sense. “Whatever Works’’ lacks the relaxed eroticism of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona’’ (for which we should probably be grateful), but it also dances nervously around the dirty old man’s fantasy at its center, one that at this date Allen really needs to own up to. No such luck: The character of Melody is thin and wholly untenable - she’s like a farmer’s daughter in a joke told at Katz’s Deli - and Wood never finds a way to make her human.