In an hour I'll be watching Whatever Works, Woody Allen's new movie that is making its world debut here at ShoWest. But since we're embargoed under threat of death from writing anything about it, I won't be able to tell you anything about it-- except for one scene. To introduce Patricia Clarkson at today's lunch, on hand to accept an award for ShoWest Independent Award for Excellence Acting, they showed a short clip from Whatever Works, which is to my knowledge the first footage anyone has seen from the film.
And it's Woody Allen with Southern accents, which we all should have expected. Clarkson plays the mother of Evan Rachel Wood's character, a girlish Southerner living in the big city and married to a man her mother doesn't approve of. In the scene the two of them are walking around a wax museum, and Clarkson is trying to convince her daughter to go on date with a nice young man she knows, whose name is something equivalent to Jimmy Ray Dylan (my notes aren't that great, unfortunately). Wood, who nails the naive-but-tough Southerner thing in this brief scene, isn't remotely interested.
I'll see how this all plays out in larger context in about an hour, but since I won't be writing anything about it, I figured I may as well share this one scene. It's a promising to start to a movie featuring the dodgy premise of a relationship between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, and if Wood's performance is as strong as it is in this brief scene, this might be yet another Woody Allen film that gets all the attention for its ladies.
