Philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) becomes more than a mentor for student Jill Pollard (Emma Stone) in Woody Allen’s IRRATIONAL MAN
IRRATIONAL MAN (Woody Allen, 2015)
Opens Friday, July 17
sonyclassics.com/irrationalman
Woody Allen mines familiar territory in his forty-sixth film as director, the perhaps overly rational Irrational Man. You won’t have to look too hard to find elements of such earlier Allen flicks as Love and Death, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match Point, and Manhattan, in addition to Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Strangers on a Train. There’s lots of philosophical discussion about the meaning of life, a potential affair between an older man and a younger woman, and an attempt to commit the perfect murder. And even though Irrational Man is not in the same league as any of its forebears, it still manages to have something intriguing to say on each of those subjects. Joaquin Phoenix stars as philosophy professor Abe Lucas, a drunken philanderer with a bad reputation who has lost his zeal for living. There’s much aflutter as he arrives at Braylin College (actually Salve Regina University in Rhode Island) to teach a summer session; fellow professor Rita Richards (Parker Posey) immediately throws herself at him, hoping he can take her away from her humdrum existence, while student Jill Pollard (Emma Stone) is more than intrigued by the dour, sour has-been. “You suffer from despair,” Jill says, to which Abe replies, “How comforting that would be.” But the prospect of pulling off the perfect murder, ridding the planet of someone who Lucas decides does not deserve to live, injects a passionate zest in the previously impotent professor as he does a one-eighty and suddenly embraces the life he had given up on.
Fellow professor Rita Richards (Parker Posey) has the hots for Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) in new Woody Allen film
The final film produced by Allen’s longtime collaborator Jack Rollins, who passed away last month at the age of one hundred, Irrational Man jumps too easily between extremes; it’s often all or nothing, with no nuance in the middle. Although none of the characters are instantly likable, you’ll end up rooting for them nonetheless as they get caught up in love and death, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Irrational Man lacks the snappy witticisms of classic Allen, and it sounds different too; instead of well-known tunes from the Jazz Age and the Great American Songbook, Allen populates the film with the music of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, using “The ‘In’ Crowd” as its overly repetitive theme. Allen has never really been part of the “in crowd” — in Annie Hall, he memorably referenced the Groucho Marx line “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member” — and Irrational Man will not do anything to change that. Despite solid performances, the film takes some twists and turns that are hard to swallow, and it struggles to get past a pervasive coldness. It has enough enjoyable moments to make it worth seeing, particularly for Allen completists/apologists — it’s unlikely to win him any new fans — but it also feels like Allen was already thinking about his next picture while still making this one. As he approaches eighty, he continues his pace of one movie per year, which he has maintained since 1982, but quantity rarely trumps quality. It’s been a long while since he’s had back-to-back triumphs, so perhaps it’s time for him to concentrate more on what he’s doing in the present rather than what’s coming next.