Curb star tries on a new pair of cranky pants

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MAPLE PICTURES David stretches out his cranky acting chops in Woody Allen�s Whatever Works.

HOLLYWOOD -- It's a seemingly innocuous question.

"How are you?" Larry David is asked.

But this being the man who stars on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm as a kind of professional curmudgeon, the man who co-authored the testy and enigmatic Seinfeld, the reply that comes firing back is, one might say, refreshingly candid.

"I guess I'm OK, you know?" says David, taking a seat in a Beverly Hills hotel room, in a tone that suggests that, well, frankly, he would rather be doing something else, somewhere else.

So, uh, doesn't he enjoy doing publicity interviews, fielding repetitive questions from entertainment reporters about Whatever Works, the new Woody Allen comedy in which David stars as an almost pathologically cantankerous former Columbia University physicist?

"No, I don't!" David says, breaking loudly into laughter. "It's not the aspect of show business that I love."

Make no mistake, though: David does love show business. And although he insists that he really is the neurotic, obnoxiously outspoken character he plays on the award-winning Curb, in person David comes across as a decidedly milder, more genteel and more vulnerable human being than his typical on-camera persona.

The thing is, he explains, cranky people are funnier than happy people.

"Positive is not funny," he says emphatically. "Nobody laughs at positive, 'What a beautiful day it is!' or how many friends I have, how many people love me. There's nothing funny about that at all. But there's funny in the negative. When you speak in negative terms, the more negative, the funnier it is. Hence, the funny crank."

"Negative" certainly is a fitting description of Boris Yellnikoff, David's character in Whatever Works, which opens in theatres July 3. A divorced, disgruntled, self-styled genius who once almost won a Nobel Prize for quantum mechanics, Boris revels in believing that he alone can perceive the desolate meaningless of existence. He scorns most ordinary human contact, apart from a few friends who tolerate his ravings, and has withdrawn into a kind of smug loathing of those people he feels don't meet his own superior intellectual standards -- all seven billion of them.

But his ornery, orderly worldview gets turned upside down when a young runaway, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), turns up at his New York apartment one night, begging for a place to sleep. After letting her in, against his better judgment, Boris finds himself caught up in a web of intersecting lives, needs and yearnings, including those of Melody's conventional-minded Southern mom (Patricia Clarkson) and conservative, Bible-thumping father (Ed Begley Jr.). As the story progresses, Boris discovers that, for better or worse, humanity is bound together by a different kind of String Theory than the one he taught at Columbia.

David says that when Allen initially offered him the role of Boris, he wasn't sure he could handle it.

With David's mother's voice ringing in his head while he was contemplating the offer, "He reassured me; he said he thought that it would be a stretch for me, but nothing that I couldn't handle. So I said OK."

Actually, this was David's third film with Allen. He had a tiny part in Radio Days (1987) where "all you got was my bald head" in an aerial shot. In Allen's Oedipus Wrecks segment from New York Stories (1989), David appeared in a brief scene in which Allen's character goes searching for his overbearing mother, who has strangely disappeared.

David says he didn't hear from Allen again until the director sent him the Whatever Works screenplay with a cover letter attached.

"And I thought the script was brilliant," David says. "But I had my doubts as to whether or not I could do it. Because it's not the kind of thing I normally do. I generally just play myself."

So who, exactly, is that?

Wood, David's costar in Whatever Works, sees a contrast between the David she performed with on camera and the one she glimpses in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

"It actually shocks me now," she says. "I go back and I watch the show, and I hear these things coming out of Larry's mouth, and I'm like, 'Whoa! That was dirty! Larry!' Because he always seemed so kind of shy."

David allows that there are major differences between Boris and his semi-autobiographical Curb character. If the latter could be diagnosed as borderline misanthropic, the former has the manner of a pit bull with Tourette's.

"My character on Curb is really normal compared to this guy, I think. My character on Curb, he wants sex, he wants to be loved, he seeks human contact. He's a much better dresser than Boris. And you know he's not quite as out there. He's a little more human."

In the most recent season of Curb, David's long-suffering wife Cheryl finally leaves him, an event precipitated by her husband's irate preoccupation with fixing his TiVo while Cheryl is on the phone telling him that the airplane she's on is caught in severe turbulence and likely to crash.

David's character now finds himself with a new romantic interest, played by Vivica A. Fox, and living with her family, the Blacks, an African American clan of New Orleans hurricane refugees who in a previous episode David reluctantly agreed to let live with him.

Like Boris in Whatever Works, David's Curb character has overcome his God-given surliness and opened his door, and his life, to new possibilities, at least temporarily.

-- Los Angeles Times

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 21, 2009 d2