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Alright, so please bear with me here.

I found this film odd in many ways, and while I find the predictability of the critics' complaint of the "creepy older man" aspect tiring, I admit that I left the film wondering what Evan Rachel Wood's character, Melodie, was even doing in this film. She sort of sets the plot in motion, but in a roundabout way. Allen's main interest seems to be the transformation of her parents, and too much time is spent in the middle of the film dealing with Melodie's affair with the blandest character imaginable while Boris disappears completely.

I was thinking that the film might have been stronger if Melodie was cut out of the script and it was Patricia Clarkson's Marietta who came to NY after her husband cheated on her. She falls in love with Boris, Boris teaches her photography, and either Marietta strays as she becomes more sexually adventurous, or Boris himself gets caught in the menage a trois (making the film a little more interesting and daring). That way, when Ed Begley's John comes to town, instead of simply showing up at the last minute so that Woody can make another didactic point when homophobic John comes out of the closet, he can play the part of Boris's rival for a bit.

As I was thinking about this, I remembered this quote from the book Conversations With Woody:

"Then I wrote another idea quickly, a dark comedy about a guy who jumped out of a window and tried to commit suicide and walked with a limp.  But when I gave it to Juliet Taylor and my sister to read they both felt that while it was very funny it would be perceived as very personal, autobiographical in a way that they would rather I didn't do.  They thought the film would never get a fair shake, no matter how good it came out, all the focus would be on this sense of autobiography that in fact did not exist but still would distract from the audience's enjoyment of the movie."

The idea he's talking about occurred to him after Match Point.
While promoting the film, Allen is saying that the script is 30 years old and was written originally for Zero Mostel and that he didn't change the script at all except to update some political references. Critics are eating this information up, mostly as a way of lambasting the film ("He left it in the drawer for a reason," "it could have used a few rewrites," etc.) But Allen has often dusted off old scripts and usually doesn't advertise this information, though it can be gleaned from past interviews. (Forum member AWA wrote to me that there was another recent interview where Allen "slipped, where he mentioned he wrote this after Match Point but wasn't able to do it for a variety of reasons, one was that it was in NYC and it had become too expensive to consider filming there"). Now, there's probably some grain of truth to the Mostel thing, but it's clear that the post-Match Point script he mentions above ("a dark comedy about a guy who jumped out of a window and tried to commit suicide and walked with a limp") is Whatever Works. The Zero Mostel thing is probably a red herring.

After this occurred to me, I began to suspect that my initial feeling was correct--that Clarkson was originally the one who comes to NY and the plot proceeds more or less as I thought it should have. But at some point, Melodie shows up. Boris leaves Marietta for Melodie, maybe because of Marietta's sexual proclivities, and...well, then the rest of the plot goes along according to plan. But instead of the awkward last scene which focuses on the two parents, who are more or less minor characters, and then two even more expendable characters, one of whom was introduced 2 minutes earlier, the last scene of the film is Marietta with her 2 boyfriends, John with his gay lover, and Boris with their daughter, while Boris looks into the camera and shrugs "Whatever works!"

This would give the final scene the ironic touch that it's missing but that's so characteristic of many of Allen films (I'm thinking the ending of Husbands & Wives). It would also account for some strange things about the film, like why Evan Rachel Wood's character is even in the film, why Boris disappears for 20 minutes, why the mother tries to hook her up with some random good-looking guy, why suddenly there's a new girl introduced in the last 2 scenes, and why the story seems to revolve around the girl's parents more than Boris and Melodie by the end. It would also explain what was deemed "too autobiographical" by Juliet Taylor and Allen's sister, why the film would never get a "fair shake," and would account for Allen's insistence that this film is 30 years old when that's clearly only half-true at best. It would also make the film stronger, in my opinion.

Now, I realize this is just idle speculation and I have only the tiniest shred of evidence in my favor, but it's just something that occurred to me and I thought I'd share it here.