WASP_DAY_18-0407.CR2 WASP_DAY_18-0407.CR2
IRRATIONAL MAN
DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Parker Posey, Emma Stone
CLASSIFICATION: 13 SV
RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Ann Hornaday
Joaquin Phoenix has grown an unsettlingly prodigious potbelly for his role in Irrational Man, in which Woody Allen returns to the terrain of his 2005 murder mystery, Match Point, with more conclusive, if less memorable, results. Phoenix plays Abe Lucas, a dissolute philosophy professor as known for his affairs with students as for his erudite theorising when he arrives for the summer term at a small liberal arts college.
Depressed, blocked and sexually stymied, Abe drinks from a perpetually topped-off flask and pontificates on Kant and Kierkegaard, emitting a frequency that only women addicted to lost causes can hear. Upon his arrival, he’s pounced on by a flirtatious science professor (Posey) and becomes the crush of one of his students, a precocious senior named Jill (Stone). When Abe comes up with a scheme to jar himself out of his psychic stasis – one that involves a local judge and an act of decisive, even fatal, come-uppance – Irrational Man starts to engage themes and cinematic gestures that should be familiar to Allen’s fans: the vagaries of chance, the power of conscience, the subtleties of situational ethics and the fine mechanics of the murder caper at its most craftily Hitchcockian.
Irrational Man exudes the good taste that viewers have come to associate with Allen’s films. Shot in a rich colour palette, it’s an indulgent pleasure to watch, from Abe’s cozy, well-appointed faculty rental to the floaty cotton frocks Stone wears with come-hither elan. Of a piece with Allen’s past work, Irrational Man is drenched in prosperity and ethnic homogeneity. Its world is comfortable, self-absorbed, insular and as white as a pair of post-Memorial Day pumps.
It isn’t a comedy. There are, however, moments that invite chuckles of recognition, especially when Posey’s character is giving Abe the business. She strikes a welcome madcap note in what is otherwise a series of bland medium shots of people talking.
What people are saying in those back-and-forth vignettes is meant to sound smart, but isn’t, really. That Irrational Man is a sophomoric simulacrum of intellectual discourse reflects the self-deception at the movie’s core. Abe’s agonising over existential despair and the futility of life sound like the bleatings of a spoilt, self-pitying narcissist. Jill, who develops the habit of starting every sentence with “Abe says” or “Abe thinks,” considers him a wildly original thinker, but the audience never hears evidence of that.
Rather, in Phoenix’s shambolic portrayal, we see a man appalled by the disconnect between his true self and others’ idealised projections. For her part, Stone is so well cast as the naive, adoring sylph that she teeters on becoming a caricature. As charming as she is, and as energetically as she throws herself into the role of would-be odalisque, she begins to have trouble with Allen’s dialogue toward the end of the movie, when things become both murky for her character and also stunningly, soberingly clear.
With a nod toward Match Point, the plot hinges on the perfect crime. But for Abe, it’s not enough to be logistically flawless. He wants the act to be aesthetically and morally perfect as well.
It’s impossible to watch Irrational Man and not be aware of Allen’s autobiography, an echo that extends beyond Jill and Abe’s May-December relationship. Allen indicts the ethical exceptionalism of Abe the Great Intellectual, but there’s little daylight between his protagonist and Woody the Great Artist. From Abe’s irresistibility to both young and age-appropriate women, to his brave refusal of Jill’s advances, to the film’s final moments of grim accountability, it’s possible to read Irrational Man as an exercise in have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too wish fulfilment. The fact that perfunctory come-uppance turns out to be not nearly as satisfying as messier moral ambiguity is something that Allen and his viewers will have to reckon with on their own. – The Washington Post
If you liked Match Point or Whatever Works, you will like this.