Clearly, Woody Allen does listen to what people say about him.

Look no further than that famous line in Stardust Memories where a woman "compliments" him by saying, "I like your early, funny films."

Whatever Works -- an ultimately soft-hearted film about the hopelessness of love -- happens to be one of his early, funny films. That is to say, he wrote it back in the '70s with Zero Mostel in mind as his dyspeptic muse, and then shoved it in a drawer until the recent Writers' Guild Strike.

It predates Allen's I-wanna-be-Bergman period (Interiors), and his heart-of-darkness period (Crimes And Misdemeanors).

Its joke ratio is higher than anything he's put out in years. But minus any real attempt to understand the universe, it does seem somehow light.

This despite the fact that its curmudgeonly protagonist, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David) is a professor of quantum mechanics, who does claim to understand the universe.

It's humans that flummox him.

At this point, since stepping back from acting in his own films, Allen has put his own words in several different people's mouths, from Kenneth Branagh to Scarlett Johansson.

But Larry David is a keeper. His Boris is a mere sidestep from his eponymous character in Curb Your Enthusiasm, a canvas to add vinegar to Allen's milquetoast misanthropy. A serial suicide attempter, he's the kind of misfit who gets paid to teach chess to children and ends up shrieking in their faces about how stupid they are.

Enter into this man's life the most unlikely of complications -- Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a beautiful, unschooled, teenage runaway from the Deep South, who begins to make herself at home, laugh at his insults, and even begins to absorb -- in her flibbertigibbet mental state -- his pearls of wisdom and contempt for bourgeois conventionality.

Eventually, they marry.

Even here, Allen seems to be addressing a common slam -- his tendency to write May/December relationships, which predates the Woody/Mia/Soon-Yi menage a trois.

Whatever Works could be an act of craven rationalization for men sleeping with women 40 years younger.

Except that Boris and Melodie are doomed, hilariously, to fail, owing to a whole slew of machinations and contrivances.

There's Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), Allen's harridan of a mother-in-law who shows up in New York praising Jesus and cursing her daughter's choice in men, and, through a quirk of networking, ends up a Bohemian photo-artist in "open" relationships.

Then there's John (Ed Begley Jr.), Melodie's dad who also shows up at her door, and whose chronic womanizing turns out to be a "front" for ... well, let's just say in certain parts of America they're convinced that a mere weekend in New York is enough to damn your eternal soul, just as it does Marietta's and John's.

You could write the last rose-coloured act of Whatever Works in your sleep (although one, literal, "falling in love" scene does kind of come out of the blue).

Still, this is a movie where the level of humour is dictated by a suicide attempt that fails because the fall is cushioned by a pedestrian, who is hospitalized, and who turns out to be a professional psychic.

Now I don't know what you think, but I think that's funny.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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