TRUMBO

The Writer and the Blacklist

Trumbo

            Perhaps out of guilt and shame—if such feelings operate out there—Hollywood has swept an important chapter in its history under a large and colorful rug.  Not even a handful of movies deal with the infamous blacklist that ruined so many careers and lives in the entertainment world back in the 1950s.  The Front, directed by Martin Ritt in 1976, which employed a cast of formerly blacklisted actors, addresses television writers and their use of an amiable dunce (Woody Allen) as a pseudonymous cover for their work, but too often plays the situation for laughs.  Although it starred some accomplished performers, including Robert De Niro and Annette Bening, Guilty By Suspicion (1991), which focuses on a blacklisted director, barely raised an eyebrow.  George Clooney’s much more successful Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) deals directly with the career of the radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow and his confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prototype for the right wing demagogues of our own time.

            Now, almost 70 years after the events, the new movie Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach, provides the best and fullest depiction of the anti-Communist hysteria and subsequent persecution of the 1940s and 1950s, centering on the career of the highly successful screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston).  The docudrama shows the actions of several victims of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by an odious Representative named J. Parnell Thomas (James DuMont), in an obvious quest to attract attention from the press and inflame the dependably panicky American public.  That hysteria promoted the careers of a great many politicians, including not only McCarthy, but an obscure Red-baiting congressman from California named Richard Nixon.

            HUAC asserted that the radio, television, and film industry employed a great many Communists and their sympathizers, who attempted in their work to subvert American values and even, in a favorite phrase, to overthrow the government of the United States.  Since most of the accused began their careers as writers, directors, and actors in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the disastrous result of laissez-faire capitalism (known these days as trickle-down economics), many of them joined various leftist movements to seek some alternative political philosophy, method, and solution.  Marxism presented such an alternative, attracting a great many intellectuals and artists to a number of radical movements and organizations, and some indeed joined the Communist Party.  When America waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union, most of those people found themselves the objects of suspicion and hatred, vilified by politicians, press, and the public.

            Once HUAC decided to pursue Communists, sympathizers, those so-called “fellow travelers” in Hollywood, the reactions, as the picture shows, followed a distressing pattern.  Resolving to resist the ridiculous charges and insinuations, actors, directors, and writers protested publicly; a number traveled to Washington to demonstrate against the actions of the committee.  The reactions of the majority of the film community, however, reveal something less than a profile in courage.  Goaded by the press, including the vicious virago Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), who blackmails Louis B. Mayer, studio executives caved under pressure and fired the people who had been making their pictures and fattening their incomes.  Many of their coworkers, initially supportive, threatened by the loss of work and the end of their careers, “named names” as the committee demanded, betraying friends and colleagues.  Others, like Dalton Trumbo, defied the committee, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights, and as a result, suffered ostracism, loss of employment, and even in some cases, like Trumbo’s, imprisonment for contempt of Congress.

            The movie shows how after serving his time, Trumbo managed to survive by writing screenplays under pseudonyms in a sort of factory he established in his home, first for Poverty Row schlockmeisters, ultimately for Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas.  He wrote some memorable films—The Brave One, Roman Holiday, Spartacus­—that won numerous awards, including a couple of Oscars that he couldn’t accept in person.   Spartacus was the first to list his name on the credits, which incited Hedda Hopper to deliver a fiery speech to the American Legion about Trumbo’s “treason,” resulting in a boycott of the movie and that right-wing group picketing theaters.  Reminding us of how times have changed, President-elect John F. Kennedy

, a genuine war hero, crossed the Legion’s picket lines to see Spartacus; I wonder if any contemporary politician possesses the courage to make such a gesture.  That act probably assisted in diluting the power of the list and the resurrection of Trumbo’s career.

            Using actors who resemble their real life counterparts—Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, for example—adds a great deal of credibility to a dramatic version of an important piece of history.  The skillful blending of actual footage from the time—newsreel films of HUAC in action, speeches and testimony by a number of Hollywood cowards, including the draft dodgers Ronald Reagan and John Wayne—with the scenes and dialogue of Trumbo, his family, friends, and colleagues both enlivens and authenticates the narrative.  The picture provides an important insight into the history of Hollywood, the history of America; it also demonstrates how the exploitation of fear creates the kind of cultural paranoia that blossoms so fragrantly in the present day.

            

SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES:

The Martian.

Based on a most entertaining novel, the movie looks more like science fact than science fiction.  Matt Damon stars as an astronaut abandoned on Mars who embarks on a solitary quest to survive on the alien landscape.  His ingenuity in using the materials, equipment, and tools left behind by the mission, the very process of his existence, provide the main plot, the survival of another Robinson Crusoe on Mars.  The movie also employs two other connected plots, the response of the various people who run NASA, and the crew of the spaceship that left Damon, believing he was dead, on the red planet; both work in some ingenious ways to communicate with him and to bring him home.  Naturally, for a picture directed by Ridley Scott, everything works wonderfully well, from the convincing Martian landscape—I’ve never been there myself—to the scenes back on Earth and in the spaceship, and the connected plots all mesh smoothly, with a suspenseful and exciting resolution.

Spectre. 

Despite the signature line in all the Bond movies, which comes straight from the Ian Fleming novels, oddly forgotten, both martinis and audiences should be stirred rather than shaken.  Unfortunately, in Spectre, the latest addition to the series, not much pleases beyond the whole lot of shaking going on.  The film resurrects a good deal of material from previous entries in the franchise, including the presence of Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Walz), a villain with the usual tiresome plans for world domination.  It also features the usual shootouts and explosions, two terrific car chases with two terrific cars, and of course Bond’s eventual and predictable triumph.  Daniel Craig once again makes a good Bond, but displays the fatigue he has confessed with a role he has promised to abandon, and the excellent Christoph Walz is entirely wasted in his silly part.  Aside from all the special effects, the repetition of so much familiar stuff suggests that the franchise seems to be running out of both energy and ideas.

War in the Shadows

Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg.

 If nothing else, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie reminds us all that far too often American politics and cultural attitudes depend on the exploitation of fear. Back in the 1950s, politicians incessantly mined the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union for popularity and support, accusing almost any entity they could imagine, including the United States Army, the State Department, and artists of all kinds (with a special emphasis on performing arts) of sympathy for Communism; the Congress formed committees to investigate people they called fellow travelers, pinkos, and “card carrying members of the Communist Party.”  (Some may recall that in his campaign against Michael Dukakis, George H.W. Bush in an attempt to revive old-school anti-Communism, called his opponent a “card carrying member of the ACLU.”)  Named after its chief practitioner, the false accusations, hysterical bullying, and demagoguery came to be known as McCarthyism; sadly, it succeeded, destroying careers and lives, intimidating scores of institutions, and electing a gaggle of politicians, not the least of them Richard Nixon.

Spielberg chooses an important but probably mostly forgotten incident from the Cold War to illustrate some of the tensions of the time.  Bridge of Spies dramatizes the back-and-forth of espionage and counterespionage in the days when the government was, as they said, finding Reds under every bed. The movie opens with the FBI’s arrest, after its customary bungling, of Colonel Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), the highest ranking Soviet spy ever discovered working in the United States.   Abel’s arrest triggers the major plot, introducing James Donovan (Tom Hanks), the lawyer assigned to defend him against the charge of espionage.

Although not entirely happy with the task, Donovan, a successful insurance attorney who has not practiced in a courtroom for years, performs the job as well as he can, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the Supreme Court.  In defending Abel, despite pressure from his wife, ostracism by his firm, and even attacks on his family, Donovan conducts the case to the best of his ability; in the process he comes to like and even admire Abel, a man of great strength and a genuine sense of honor.  Considering himself a loyal soldier for his country, Abel refuses to cut a deal with the prosecution and tolerates his confinement with stoic courage.

In a parallel story that ultimately and dramatically intersects with the case, the movie shows the training and launching of the notorious U2 program of secret spy flights over the Soviet Union, which exploded into public knowledge with the shooting down of a plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, played in the movie by Austin Stowell.  Bridge of Spies reaches a kind of climax when, after dealing with both German and Soviet recalcitrance, Donovan manages to work out an exchange of prisoners, Abel for Powers, on the bridge of the title.  James Donovan’s sharp dealing, his skill at negotiating, foreshadowed in a scene with a rival insurance lawyer, achieves an outcome that no one believed could succeed.

While capturing in documentary style some of the fear mongering of the time, the director dramatizes some incidents in the course of Donovan’s work.  He shows the hasty construction of the Berlin Wall occurring in the cold and snow of November, just as Donovan desperately tries to enter East Germany; in reality, the Wall went up in August of 1961, with little chance of snow.  He also only briefly alludes to Donovan’s work at the Nuremberg trials and never mentions his wartime service with the O.S.S.  To maintain suspense in a story whose conclusion is known, no small feat, he intercuts between the training of the U2 pilots, Donovan’s efforts to help his client, the striking differences between East and West Berlin, and even the various prisons that come to serve as a metaphor in the film.  Rudolf Abel languishes at Fort Leavenworth; after a show trial, Powers is condemned to ten years in a Russian prison; an unlucky American graduate student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers) finds himself on the wrong side of the Wall and, accused of espionage, spends time in an East German prison; and Donovan himself, set up by a German lawyer, is arrested and temporarily jailed by the East Berlin police.

The dialectic of that construction and Spielberg’s skillful manipulation of his material keeps the film in a constant tension, a taut wire never loosened, a sharp edge never blunted by the actuality of history.  Its relatively low key style, rather unusual for a director known for blockbusters, shows, with some irony and even some humor, the courage, commitment, and skill of a relative amateur, who consistently outwits the opposition and outthinks all his allies in the CIA.

The two principal actors also deserve a great deal of credit for participating in an authenticity of character that meshes appropriately with the movie’s sense of time and place as well as its low-key approach to its subject.  As the reluctant defense attorney who grows to like and admire his client, Tom Hanks works with conviction and a wry sense of humor, showing hints of an irony he’s displayed in some of his comic roles in the past.  The real triumph of the film’s acting, however, belongs to Mark Rylance, who displays an almost uncanny minimalism in his performance as Colonel Abel.  With very few words, a narrow range of facial expressions, a limited array of gestures, he somehow conveys a remarkable variety of emotions, constructing a really quite admirable personality that, in their several scenes together, entirely steals the picture from Hanks.  Just like the character he portrays, he remains a mystery, but also engages the sympathy of the audience, not the hated Commie spy, but a man of honor and courage according to his own principles and beliefs.

For recalling an important incident from a dark time and telling the story with objectivity and entirely without prejudice, Spielberg deserves a good deal of credit.  In showing the courage of two different men from two different backgrounds, Bridge of Spies shows how well a movie can work, with all its elements—acting, cinematography, plotting, and construction—functioning together.  Though different from many of his previous productions, Bridge of Spies demonstrates all over again his skill as a cinematic storyteller.

Black Mass

The FBI’s Least Wanted Man

Black Mass, directed by Scott Cooper.

            The progress of that grand American form, the gangster film, demonstrates the perennially fascinating and intricate connections between life and art.  The form began fictionalizing the exploits of actual criminals, virtually lionized in the newspapers and consequently entirely familiar to the public, in that first great trilogy, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface.  The practice continued in film after film, stretching for decades from the 1930s to the present—think of Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather trilogy, and GoodFellas.  Now Black Mass reinforces the tradition, emphasizing that unusual relationship between what we like to think of as real life and the creation of art.

            Black Mass, as most viewers know, deals with the life and career of James “Whitey” Bulger (played by Johnny Depp), who ran the Irish mob in Boston and worked closely with the FBI, both as a protected informant and perhaps even as an instrument for the agency’s own misdeeds.  Although it necessarily omits numerous details and of course dramatizes a substantial amount of the drab daily business of crime, a far less glamorous subject than its treatment in the movies, the picture provides a reasonably accurate summation of Whitey Bulger’s career during its most successful years.  The film shows the middle and end of his career, skipping his youthful crimes and his early incarceration in Alcatraz, concentrating mostly on his relationship with a childhood friend and fellow native son of South Boston (Southie to its residents), the FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).

            In a quest to rid Boston of the Italian mob, Connolly persuades Bulger to provide information on La Cosa Nostra in exchange for a kind of protection from investigation of his own criminal activities, which consist of gambling, loan sharking, drug peddling, and their almost inevitable consequences, murder.  Although Bulger prizes loyalty above all other qualities and systematically tortures and kills anyone suspected of snitching, he actually follows a long Irish tradition of informing, an act of self destruction that perennially defeated the historic struggles against the British in Ireland itself.

            The narrative runs in a kind of retrospective, showing the interrogation of Bulger’s associates, who ultimately turned on him for a variety of reasons, especially in order to escape the most severe possible punishments, then opening up into the visual story.  All of them guilty of various crimes, including murder, they relate a number or anecdotes about their experience with Whitey, as friend, assistant, fellow killer.  The story, barely fictionalized and well known now, shows a career of almost unparalleled ruthlessness, and above all, the collaboration between Bulger and Connolly, between the Whitey’s Winter Hill Gang and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

            Aside from the steady diet of torture and murder, an incomplete record of Bulger’s crimes, the film at least shows some the culpability of the FBI in the gangster’s achievements.  The connection between Connolly and Bulger ultimately involved the agent and one of his colleagues, John Morris (David Harbour) in a number of crimes; Connolly and Morris concealed evidence, falsified records, fingered at least one informant whom Bulger killed, and even tipped him off when the heat from their bureau threatened exposure and arrest.

            Despite its resources and its publicity, the FBI remains something of a gold standard for official incompetence.  The Bureau’s record in the search for the Unabomber, the two-year hunt in North Carolina for a fugitive ultimately arrested by a probationary patrolman, the botched anthrax case, or one of my favorites, the failure to catch the serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who was driving a stolen red pickup truck with New Jersey plates all over Miami and using his own credit card, often seems like a bad comedy, funnier if it hadn’t resulted in so many deaths.  The Whitey Bulger case, however, reveals an unsuspected record of crime and dishonesty; some people, including this writer, believe that Bulger escaped arrest for so many years because the FBI really didn’t want to catch him—his arrest would reveal the Bureau’s involvement, much of which remains hidden.

Like its many predecessors in the last century, the movie itself follows the patterns of both history and fiction.  Just as the makers of those great gangster flicks from the 1930s ripped their people and events from the headlines, Black Mass recounts a story well known to many of its viewers that even at times resembles a documentary.  Only a few of its cast members rank among recognizable actors—Johnny Depp of course and the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon as John Connolly’s supervisor—which underlines the authenticity of the story.  In addition, gangster movies are generally brother movies, in which the brothers sometimes pursue polar opposite careers, with the gangster’s brother a cop or a lawyer or even a priest.  Black Mass shows the relationship between Whitey and his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who rose from the same working-class background in a political career that made him the most powerful legislator in the state, then the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts: you can’t make this sort of thing up, though as Mark Twain noted, life is stranger than fiction because life has no need to be probable.

Showing a heretofore hidden penchant for malevolence, Depp captures the look and feel of the psychopathic Bulger, willing to kill anyone for the slightest infraction of his rules—disloyalty above all, but also insults, and the mere possibility that someone might inform on him.  In his most vicious murder, he strangles the stepdaughter of his closest associate, Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane) because she knows too much, while Flemmi looks on, helpless to prevent it, perhaps frightened of his boss’s willingness to erase any opposition: no wonder his henchmen finally betrayed him.  Above all, of course, the notion that Bulger himself worked as an informant for the FBI underlines his own lack of loyalty or even a violation of something like gangster’s honor.  In his trial, not shown in the movie, he reacted angrily when anyone called him a rat, the lowest animal in his sphere, which despite all his other crimes labeled him the very thing he hated.

While conforming to the conventions of its genre, the movie represents the new face of gangsterism, the collusion with law enforcement touched on in GoodFellas , a situation in which the good guys now closely resemble the bad guys, even to the point of informing on their own colleagues in order to receive a light sentence.  Disappointingly, it omits the alleged search for Bulger, which took 16 years and covered three continents, and the surprising method that led to his capture.  That search suggests the reluctance of the FBI to find the man who assisted in their corruption, whose accomplices they became, and whose actions forever tarnish the well shined image of their badge.  The story of Whitey Bulger really needs another movie to deal with all the subjects raised in Black Mass.

On the Road Again

The End of the Tour, directed by James Ponsoldt.

The subject of the artist presents some special appeal in film, in part because of the inherent fascination of an art that in effect studies and transforms another art.  Among the many actual artists studied in numerous biopics, unfortunately, writers constitute the least promising material for that study and transformation.  The visual and musical arts naturally work well--painters making their masterpieces, composers creating music provide obvious subjects, which talented directors can turn into exciting images.  If the person in question, like most great artists, led a troubled or colorful life, the the filmmaker can plunder the biography for all sorts of interesting details--unhappy childhoods, love affairs, even crimes, the whole spectrum of behaviors that often please both producers and audiences.  More important than biography, however, the very creation of a work of art makes for appealing cinema.  Although probably not limited to American film, Hollywood handles the fascination of sheer process with special distinction--the barn raising in Witness, for example, Robert Redford crafting Wonderboy in The Natural, John Travolta assembling the accident sequence in Blow Out--so that the painting of a picture, the composition of a symphony, and even the staging of a show in all those backstage musicals make perfect subjects in numerous movies.

Writers and writing, however, cannot compete with those arts and those artists.  Few writers, for example, if they are not Ernest Hemingway, lead interesting or eventful lives, a fact that haunted a number of American novelists, including James Jones, Robert Roark, and above all, Norman Mailer.  More important, the act of writing, unlike the act of painting, sculpting, or making music possesses very little visual interest.  Whether with a chisel on a clay tablet, a quill pen, a typewriter, or a word processor, writing looks boring (which it often is)--someone staring at a blank sheet of sheepskin, paper, or the gray gloaming of a computer screen hardly qualifies as a compelling image.  The process, after all, takes place somewhere inside the head, the heart, or even the genitals, which the dancer Pearl Lang called "that lonely place between the legs."  Those internal processes seldom translate successfully to the screen, unless a director with more than the usual quantity of imagination finds some way of showing creative composition turning into action, a rare feat George Roy Hill accomplished in The World According to Garp, in a sequence that showed the title character writing as a series of images coalesce into a charming short story.

After all that pedantry, which I hope whatever readers are out there will forgive, the latest movie about a writer, The End of the Tour, avoids anything like the actual process of writing in order to concentrate on a writer's thoughts about his art, his ambitions, fame, life, and other heavy stuff.  Based on a memoir by David Lipsky, a writer for Rolling Stone, the film shows the five days that Lipsky, played in the movie by Jesse Eisenberg, spent with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), interviewing the author about his work and his life.  At that point, Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, enjoys an enormous success with the publication, sales, and critical reception of thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest.  That novel created a kind of cult around the author and, sadly and inevitably, his suicide cemented his cultish appeal.  (The film never raises one obvious question: how many people actually read that enormous book?)

Wallace and Lipsky it it off well from the opening moments of their connection and, despite a couple of incidents that create some anger between two neurotic individuals, generally appreciate each other's company.  Lipsky watches Wallace teaching a creative writing class at a local Illinois college, then accompanies him on a book tour to Minneapolis, where he reads from his novel, autographs copies, appears on an NPR interview, and meets up with on old graduate school friend.  Throughout they discuss life, writing, fame, relationships, and other related matters; in fact, the film mostly consists of conversations between the two, with Wallace delivering philosophical insights in a dreary monotone and Lipsky writing them down.  Unlike most movies about writers, The End of the Tour never shows the novelist scratching his head and staring out the window, the usual visible signs of writing in progress.  That choice, however, fails to turn the writer and his writing into anything cinematically appealing.

A dried-out alcoholic, Wallace appears to subsist on the whole panoply of junk food that American companies sell to poison the populace.  He gorges on doughnuts and soft drinks, eats Pop Tarts for breakfast, and treats Lipsky to what he considers an upscale meal at McDonald's.  His culinary tastes emphasizes some elements of his troubled, perhaps addictive personality.  Occasionally he refers to his time in the famous psychiatric institution, McLean Hospital, the preferred recovery place for affluent literary types; the depression he suffered from for most of his life apparently led him, despite all his success, to hang himself.  The news of that death begins the movie, which flashes back to Lipsky's experience with him and all those conversations that follow and essentially provide the substance of the movie.  Despite the sad subtext and back story, the film remains a dull effort, neither making its subject interesting or his work accessible; it may, however, inspire people to read his magnum opus and will surely magnify his reputation and the cult it created.

Old Timer's Rock and Roll

Ricki and the Flash,  directed by Jonathan Demme.

            Disproving the common contention that older women rarely find starring roles in Hollywood these days, Meryl Streep just keeps on acting.  Perhaps because she plays what might be called age-appropriate parts instead of attempting some sort of faded ingénue, she maintains a busy and distinguished career.  Whatever its merits, her latest movie, Ricki and the Flash,  once again demonstrates both her versatility and her commitment to her art; it also provides a kind of showcase for yet another facet of her onscreen persona.

            Streep plays the Ricki of the title, a superannuated rock and roll guitarist who plays with her band, The Flash, in a hole in the wall called The Salt Well, and works as a cashier in a place called Total Foods, which should indicate exactly the level of both her musicianship and her success.  The Well’s habitués, a scruffy lot, many of them beyond their first youth, apparently adore Ricki and her group; her fellow guitarist, Greg (Rick Springfield) a sensitive soul, also adores Ricki, who rejects him onstage, hurting his feelings terribly. 

Ricki interrupts her career in music and at the supermarket to return to Indianapolis when her ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) calls with the news that their daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer), despondent over her husband leaving her, has attempted suicide.  While Ricki (real name Linda) deserted her family to follow her musical dreams, Pete cared for their three children, remarried, and prospered; he now lives in a mansion in a gated community, where Ricki seems as out of place as, well, an aged rocker in a motorcycle jacket, skintight pants, tattoos, and yards of jewelry in an affluent, uptight bourgeois ghetto. 

Most of the movie shows the tensions between Ricki and her grown children, understandably estranged and resentful, concentrating particularly on the fractured relationship between Ricki and Julie.  Some of its humor results from the contrasts between the world Ricki embraces and the one she left behind, with neither one emerging as an entirely positive dwelling place.  The plot inevitably concludes at the wedding of Ricki’s older son, an event fraught with tension until, despite all the complicated problems and her own mistakes and bad decisions, Ricki manages a most unlikely way to save the situation.

The movie primarily exists to demonstrate once again Meryl Streep’s versatility and commitment to her art; much of its surrounding hype concentrates on the fact that she learned to play the electric guitar and sing in order to play Ricki.  She apparently plays the few rudimentary chords demanded and sings no worse than most of the contemporary screamers of rock music, but she really shouldn’t quit her day job, either in Hollywood or at Total Foods.  Sadly, she also looks quite silly and even embarrassing in her ridiculous hairdo and attire, exactly like someone dressed up to impersonate a rock musician at a Halloween party.  As embarrassing as her appearance, the relationship with a younger man played by Rick Springfield, an actual major rock star, never achieves either conviction or chemistry, and his doglike devotion to her makes no sense at all.

One of the more interesting aspects of Streep’s recent work reflects a willingness to play negative characters.  The icy autocrat of The Devil Wears Prada, the alcoholic harridan of August: Osage County, and now the self-absorbed musician of Ricki and the Flash certainly demonstrate versatility and perhaps even a kind of artistic courage.  The movie itself, directed by, of all people, Jonathan Demme, exhibits a kind of confusion about its subject: should we admire Ricki’s choice of her art, such as it is, over something like normal life, or condemn her abandonment of her children?  Its resolution suggests a far too easy and sentimental papering over of that problem. 

   

Woody Goes to College

Irrational Man, written and directed by Woody Allen.

            If for no other reason, Woody Allen deserves some respect for his consistency and productivity; he brings out—I am tempted to write emits or perhaps excretes—a new movie almost every year.  With rare exceptions, like the wildly untypical Blue Jasmine, his work demonstrates a self-satisfied decline into mediocrity at best and failure at worst.  The dull, laborious, and essentially unsatisfying nature of most of his films in recent years—recent decades, actually—suggests one of the negative aspects of consistency: he repeats himself over and over again.

            Moving from his usual haunts in Manhattan and his recent jaunts to Europe, Allen sets Irrational Man in Braylin College, a small, charming campus in Rhode Island, apparently one of those Potted Ivies.  The protagonist, Abe Lukas (Joaquin Phoenix), a highly regarded professor of philosophy, arrives to teach what seems to be a summer school course.  Something of an academic superhero, in addition to his scholarly work his personal history includes vague stories about time in Iraq, in Bangladesh, and doing something or other in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. 

Alcoholic, impotent, depressed, he now finds little satisfaction in his teaching or research, which he tells the audience about in frequent voiceovers, matched by similar voiceovers from one of his students, Jill (Emma Stone), who naturally falls in love with him.  A sexually aggressive colleague (Parker Posey) throws herself at him, but his impotence prevents him from consummating a relationship with either woman.  When he accidentally stumbles upon a motive for what he considers a justified homicide, an existential act, his problems magically disappear and he finds himself transformed in every way.

The movie displays most of the usual Woody Allen themes and motifs, minus his distressing proclivity for turning situations into gags.  In the classroom Phoenix mouths some familiar references, essentially one liners, to Kant and Kierkegaard, mentions Husserl and phenomenology, and discusses Dostoevsky with Jill—he even keeps a copy of The Idiot by his bedside—but never expands on or digs deeply into any of the substance of those writers and thinkers.  The method, presumably the director’s notion of scholarly discourse, suggests a kind of academic name dropping rather than serious inquiry.

 All of that of course reflects Allen’s familiar obsessions with difficult writers and Deep Thoughts, with perhaps a touch of his ambivalence about intellectuals and intellectualism.  In Irrational Man he raises some of the issues that appear in his Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, but resolves them quite differently, with a hardly believable and artificially pat ending that recalls Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. 

With almost no real sense of passion or engagement, the emotional level of the film parallels its intellectual depth; everybody seems bland, smug, or even willfully obtuse in a manner that recalls those many Hollywood depictions of college professors, people with a limited understanding of real life.  Joaquin Phoenix mumbles a good deal of the time and delivers most of his lines in this very talky picture in an offhand, generally affectless manner.  The only character with any energy is the sexually voracious chemistry professor played by Parker Posey, who seems a good deal more attractive than Emma Stone’s enraptured undergraduate.

Woody Allen employs the scenery of Rhode Island to good effect, capturing the summertime light, the charming towns, the picturesque seashore; even a scene in a garish amusement park—is there another kind?—looks polished and precise.  He also constructs the film with a fine sense of unity, keeping the action and characters tightly under control, and including a device worthy of Chekhov to conclude the plot.  Irrational Man, something of a pun itself, provides a certain charm with a certain lack of impact, not untypical of Woody Allen, who more and more appears to be imitating himself.