Forty-five features into his half-century of moviemaking, the rote obsessions distinguishing Woody Allen’s furtive protagonists — luck, fate, chance, getting away with murder – have extended more and more to Allen’s own approach to screenwriting.
A mixture of the obvious and the indecisive, “Irrational Man” stars Joaquin Phoenix as philosophy professor Abe Lucas, new arrival to fictional Braylin College in Newport, R.I. He’s notorious for being a drunk, a womanizer, a provocateur. Emma Stone is one of his students, Jill Pollard, drawn to Abe’s brooding pessimism and self-destruction because it is so, so infernally sexy. Also, Abe would never wear teal Polo shirts (teal being the shorthand color for “callow, moneyed youth”), whereas Jill’s callow, moneyed boyfriend (Jamie Blackley) would. Proudly.
Dining with Abe over candlelight, Stone is required to say things like: “I love that you order for me.” Really? Big-footing the menu? Is that appealing in any man on any planet? In last summer’s Allen picture, “Magic in the Moonlight,” a character said of the steely mope played by Colin Firth: “Obsessed with mortality … believes in nothing … a very unhappy man. I like him.” That was a joke; in the nominally serious “Irrational Man,” we’re meant to take Abe’s smarmy passivity and increasingly desperate coping mechanisms straight, no chaser.
Abe and Jill take turns narrating the plot at us in voiceover, the mechanics of which are set up with comical expediency (a strategy that works better in comedy). Around the midpoint the film introduces the latest in Allen’s “perfect murder” scenarios. At a restaurant Abe and Jill overhear a conversation about a corrupt family-court judge and a woman losing custody of her children. Abe decides to act as anonymous sinner-saint. The film’s second half chronicles the execution of Abe’s murderous deed and the aftermath.
Comedies, dramas or in between, we don’t go to Woody Allen for realism. Some of his movies skate over matters of logic and human interest (to the degree that the filmmaker’s interested in other humans) more readily than others. “Irrational Man” is full of holes. Abe’s supposed to be a disillusioned activist, with a history of volunteer work in Darfur and Bangladesh and post-Katrina New Orleans, yet that side of him is so half-assedly developed, it’s as if Allen himself didn’t believe it. Parker Posey takes the other major female role, that of a lonely science professor who throws herself at Abe. Once Abe latches onto his scheme, borrowing pieces of “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” and other, better Allen films, he regains his lust for life, along with his sexual potency. The affair with Jill flowers, though “Irrational Man” never makes up its mind: Is this affair public? Private? A secret? Not?
Allen is no dummy, but he is also not his own best editor or critic. The tone here is all over the place — Viagra jokes up against plodding, second-hand philosophical disquisitions. The 1965 Ramsey Lewis Trio recording of “The ‘In’ Crowd” recurs so often on the soundtrack, by the end credits it sounds like we’ve heard it in a dozen earlier Allen films even though we haven’t. Stone responds to the material with some effective ambiguity in her reaction shots, in between the lines, but both she and Phoenix are playing not-quite-humans, and Phoenix can barely get through some of the clumsier dialogue alive. Photographed in warm, pretty tones by the ace Darius Khondji, the film paradoxically saves its most vivid shot for an icy close-up of Abe, seconds after putting his plan in motion, breathing hard and looking wild-eyed. For a moment, “Irrational Man” shuts its patronizing trap and shows us some verifiably human behavior.
“Irrational Man” (2 stars)
Rating: R, for some language and sexual content
Showing: Guild 45th, Meridian
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