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.
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