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.