Irrational Man

Synopsis:  Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), a controversially brilliant but self-destructive philosophy professor takes a job at a small East Coast college where his arrival causes much campus gossip about his reputation for drinking and his sexual exploits. Indeed, he quickly draws in two very different women – Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), who is a bright-eyed student in one of his classes, and Rita Richards (Parker Posey), a fellow professor in an unhappy marriage. But Abe finds it difficult to truly connect with either woman intimately, at least untilhe  becomes obsessed with the idea of committing the perfect and, in his distorted world view, morally explicable murder.

There was a time when a new film by Woody Allen was, for me at least, a cause for great excitement and anticipation. When I first saw Manhattan in 1979, I was so taken by the brilliance of the film that I turned around and went straight back in and watched it all over again.  And even though there have been many highlights in his film career since then, the likes of Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989)  I can’t say that anything he’s made in the past twenty-five years has grabbed me as much as the films he made in his first twenty-five years. Even Midnight in Paris (2001) and Blue Jasmine (2013) despite their critical acclaim and popularity did very little for me. So it was with some apprehension that I went to see this new offering from my one time hero.

The good news is that it’s not terrible. But the bad news is that it’s not that good, which is a shame not just because it’s another ordinary outing from a once great filmmaker, but because the idea, whilst not new, is one worthy of deeper exploration. Hitchcock ventured into similar philosophical territory in 1948 with Rope, which gave us the story of a student who attempts to impress his teacher by killing for the sake of killing. In Irrational Man the roles are reversed and it’s the philosophy teacher who embarks upon the existential affirmation he seeks through the taking of another life to the abhorrence of his student and lover.

On the plus side, the three central performances from Phoenix, Stone and Posey are engaging and authentic, at least as much as they can be within the slight screenplay. And therein lies the problem. The film feels like a ‘Woody-Lego’ model assembled from all the familiar pieces we see so often – the young girl who falls for the older man, the check-list of iconic names from Kierkegaard to Dostoyevsky to Sartre who have tackled the meaninglessness of life, the tasteful lifestyles and settings within which the characters live and the irresistibly cool jazz soundtrack. These are the usual suspects in many of Allen’s screenplays. But these elements, used brilliantly in earlier works have now, through overuse, lost their cachet, leaving the audience feeling like we’ve seen all this before. They distract us from the story which is left without enough breathing room to unfold to the full extent of its potential. It’s a pity, because I’d have loved to have seen this film made by the Woody Allen we knew and loved in 1979. And whilst I still hold out hope for maybe one great last hurrah from the master, it feels like the relentless imperative of turning out the ‘annual Woody Allen offering’ is the impediment to that possibility and that Woody Allen films have now become more about quantity than quality.

 

 

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