As Marietta, a motormouth Mississippian who's come to New York to find her runaway daughter - played by Evan Rachel Wood, and found shacking up with a misanthropic loser played by Larry David - Clarkson delivers the funniest, most overtly comic performance of her career.

"I think of myself as a comedienne - I just make a living doing all that drama and serious stuff," she says, letting loose a hearty guffaw. "Put me in a French maid's outfit and slamming doors and I'm most happy."

And while there's no French maid's outfit in Whatever Works - which opened Friday at the Ritz Five and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NJ, and expands to more theaters next weekend - there are a few slamming doors. And plenty of laugh-inducing scenes, many of which Clarkson serves as catalyst for.

"I really love doing comedy," says the actress, a presence in such formidable indie projects as Pieces of April (a supporting actress Oscar nomination), The Station Agent, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Lars and the Real Girl.

"But there's not a lot of really, truly comedic parts for women in their 40s. The comedic parts become something else, and I'm not sure what that is, I don't know how to describe it. But they're peripheral, they're one-joke wonders, and they're not genuinely funny.

"But Marietta is. It's a delicious part, and it was fun to play. Nerve-wracking, too, because she is out on a limb. And I am a Southern girl, so I had to go through this archetypal character, something of a stereotype, which is what Woody wanted us to embrace. To embrace it, and then kind of go beyond it."

Raised in New Orleans, Clarkson moved to New York when she was 19, studied theater at Fordham University, and got herself into the Yale drama school. She's been living in New York since the mid-'80s, and she's on the phone from there, in her apartment, lying on her bed. ("But I do have clothes on," she cracks.)

Clarkson had a memorable supporting role in Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as an American expat who invites Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson to stay at her home in the Spanish city. But the famously reticent Allen didn't indicate that he had another, bigger, project in mind for Clarkson until some time after the film had wrapped.

"I had a small but beautiful part in Vicky Cristina, so it wasn't like I was working every day with him. But I had the sense that we got along," she says.

"But then, after we finished shooting the movie, I heard that he was thinking about me for this part, and then I got the offer, and he sent a beautiful note, again, like he did with Vicky Cristina. He sends notes. . . . It's really sweet. The first one, for Vicky Cristina, at the end of it it said something like, 'If you have something better to do, I'll understand.'

"So, he has you at the note - so charming. And then the second one was, you know, 'If you like this part let me know.' "

And how could she not? Like Marietta, Clarkson hails from the South, and like Marietta, she experienced a kind of cultural and creative awakening when she moved to New York.

"Definitely, oh my goodness, absolutely," says Clarkson, her raspy voice still tinged with a bit of Louisiana singsong. "Now, I came from a progressive home, not a fundamentalist home . . . a classic, middle-class, somewhat upper-middle-class home, but leaving the South was a very big deal for me. . . .

"I was this naive Southern girl, came to the big city of New York . . . and it ended up being the best thing I ever did. I arrived from the South with big hair and eventually it relaxed, and maybe I relaxed - just a real Southern girl here in the city. . . . So, yes, Marietta and I, I understand that journey. I was 19 when I took it, and Marietta's a middle-aged woman, but I understand."

It doesn't look as though there's much comedy in Clarkson's next film, the Martin Scorsese-directed Shutter Island. Set for release in October, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a U.S. marshal looking for an escaped murderess on an island housing a hospital for the criminally insane. Watch the trailer (www.shutterisland.com) and you'll get a glimpse of Clarkson, with jet-black hair, illuminated by fire, saying something ominous like, "You do understand that they can't let you leave?"

Creepy.

"I haven't seen the trailer yet because I don't have a computer," she says. "But I have gotten a lot of calls: 'Patty, what's going on? You look really scary!' Well, I'm a woman in a cave! Give me a break."

So, from Woody to Marty; not bad, right?

"Yes, I've worked with these two men that I have high hopes for," she deadpans. "As I left their sets I just said, 'Good luck, good luck, good luck.' "

'Tokyo!' triptych. One of the more strangely satisfying art-house ventures of the spring makes its debut on DVD and Blu-Ray Tuesday, and it's well worth checking out. Tokyo! (Liberation Entertainment) is actually a set of three short films set in the teeming Japanese metropolis, each made by outsiders and each, in its own way, jarring and crazy. Frenchmen Michel Gondry and Leos Carax and South Korea's Bong Joon-ho are the perpetrators, and the standout is Gondry's "Interior Design," in which a young Japanese couple hunting for an apartment stay in the claustrophobic flat of a friend while looking for jobs and a space to call their own. As fans of Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) might expect, these routine pursuits turn pretty weird: actress Ayako Fujitani undergoes a particularly unusual metamorphosis. Trailers and such can be found at www.tokyothemovie.com.