Irrational Man

Irrational Man is Woody Allen’s latest lightweight rehash of themes he explored far better in earlier films. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a brilliant but nihilistic philosophy professor and Emma Stone as the smart and sexy student who gets swept up in his existential crisis. Like Allen himself, Pheonix’s Abe Lucas is a cynical, isolated man who believes life has no meaning. But unlike the seventy-nine year old filmmaker, the middle-aged Lucas has no creative outlet to distract him. Bored with both imparting tired philosophical concept to mediocre college kids and having affairs with them, the drunk, impotent Lucas lives a checked-out, booze-numbed existence until his friendship with Stone’s vivacious Jill Pollard leads him circuitously to a new sense of purpose and zest for life.

Like several of Allen’s pictures, the plot centers on morality and murder. It lacks the narrative depth and cinematic craftsmanship of his masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) or its less complex but still riveting retread Match Point (2005). It’s not anywhere near as compelling as his most enjoyable film about murder, the delightfully comedic Hitchcockian homage and meditation on aging Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).   Irrational Man lifts scenes and ideas from all these movies (not to mention everything it borrows from any intro to philosophy class) but the Allen picture it most resembles is the director’s all but forgotten dramatic thriller Cassandra's Dream (2007). As with that picture, which was set in working class London, a strong cast and a fresh (for Allen) setting keep an uninspired film engaging as it unfolds but little of it lingers in the mind once it’s over.

The mumbling method actor Pheonix is an odd choice for the lead in a Woody Allen picture—and an even odder choice for philosophy professor—but he’s always an actor who’s fun to watch even when he isn't connecting to the lines he’s muttering.  Emma Stone, whose first picture with Allen was the previous year’s unforgivably boring Magic in the Moonlight, fits well into the familiar Allen role of a sexy young thing whose head is easily turned by an older man’s dark and shallow narcissism.  As is usually the case with this trope, she turns out in the end to be a better human being than he because of (rather than in spite of) her bourgeois “limitations.” The film’s best performance comes from Parker Posey as a middle-aged chemistry professor who harbors romantic fantasies about Abe Lucas that are more realistic than Jill’s. Posey usually plays her quirky characters to such over the top extremes that she wears me out before a movie is halfway over. In this supporting role, however, she delivers the most nuanced and sympathetic performance of the film—and gets me excited about her potential for playing middle-aged roles in the second half of her career. 

Irrational Man takes place in contemporary Newport Road Island, an unexpected location for the famously urban filmmaker. Unfortunately, cinematographer Darius Khondji, in his fifth collaboration with Allen, does little more than make the actors and the fictional college campus look attractive and inviting. The sloppy screenplay, like most of Allen’s writing of the past decade, feels like a first draft that could have benefited greatly from a few simple revisions. We get fairly extensive voiceover from both main characters and much of what they impart to us through the dueling narration is laughably gauche. Yet somehow the lazy Irrational Man manages to cast a minor spell that intrigues enough to hold a viewer through most of its 96 minute running time. Perhaps, as with Allen’s Midnight In Paris (2011), the central premise is string enough to keep us engaged. The idea of a man who has given up on life discovering that a morally questionable act can rekindle his joie de vivre is ideal subject matter for Allen. Too bad it hasn't caused to him to up his game.