Woody Allen’s ‘Irrational Man’ Explores Life’s Randomness
In Woody Allen’s 1987 drama “September,” a writer and a physicist walk into a room (well, really, they’re playing pool) when the writer asks the physicist, “Is there anything more terrifying than the destruction of the world?” The physicist, sunk deep in gloomy shadow, answers, “Yeah, the knowledge that it doesn’t matter one way or the other — that it’s all random, radiating aimlessly out of nothing and eventually vanishing forever.” The physicist says that he’s not talking about the world. “I’m talking about the universe,” adding, “all space, all time, just a temporary convulsion.”
The exchange is in keeping with Mr. Allen’s oft-repeated insistence, on-screen and off, that life is meaningless, which may be true even if he seems feverishly bent on refuting it with his prodigious cinematic output. If you’ve seen any of that yield, you have seen a version of “Irrational Man.” As tends to be the case with his work, this new light and dark film looks, sounds and plays a lot like some of his previous titles. That isn’t a dig. One of the givens of Mr. Allen’s screen work and sometimes its attractions is how each new film registers as another chapter in a project that, in its scale and scope, and in the way in which it seems to speak to his personal life, has come to resemble a weird metafiction. In his short story “The Book of Sand,” Jorge Luis Borges creates “an infinite book” without beginning or end, which is another way of describing how it can feel when considering the entirety of Mr. Allen’s films.
Trailer: ‘Irrational Man’
A brilliant but burned-out professor takes a job at a small college, when a dramatic, existential event makes him see the world in a more positive light.
By Sony Pictures Classics on Publish DateMay 2, 2015. Photo by Internet Video Archive. Watch in Times Video »
The faces in those movies change as do their budgets and all the contingent rest — the support staff, locations, costumes and so forth, even as the preoccupations remain much the same. In “Irrational Man,” the usual resident Allen philosopher is an actual philosopher, Abe Lucas, a newly arrived East Coast college professor whom Joaquin Phoenix makes equal parts attraction and repulsion. A soulful presence, Mr. Phoenix excels at playing characters who often struggle to express themselves one tormentedor comically inarticulate word at a time. Here, though consistently watchable, he often seems ready to flee the scene, perhaps because his character is so uneasy or because Mr. Allen hasn’t given Mr. Phoenix enough material to turn Abe into a thinker who can persuasively cite Heidegger.
Mr. Allen’s habit of not giving his performers much direction means that they sometimes end up fending for themselves, which can create an almost unintentional Brechtian alienation effect as they struggle to get a hold on their characters. At times, Mr. Phoenix doesn’t seem to be grappling; he seems disengaged, as if he — rather than Abe — were estranged from what’s happening around him. That’s especially true in his scenes with Emma Stone, who plays Jill, an eager A student who’s attracted to Abe because that’s how she was written. Much of the time Ms. Stone, who leads with a smile that dims, seems to be trying to coax a reaction out of Mr. Phoenix. That gives the movie an uneasy edge, as does Parker Posey’s turn as Rita, a sexed-up cliché.
The story turns on chance and its absence and starts humming when, after eavesdropping on a dramatic conversation in a diner, Abe decides to commit a crime in the name of a greater good. Armed with poison and some spurious reasoning, he does the deed and finds himself rejuvenated creatively, spiritually, sexually: It makes him tumescent. Mr. Allen plays this notion for some weak laughs; better is the powerful close-up of Abe’s face after the crime — his unfocused eyes staring ahead and ringed in violent red — that suggests the frenzied madness of the void. It’s startling and unsettling for what it conveys about Abe and because unlike in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” in which a rabbi responds to another void by plaintively invoking a “moral structure,” there’s no real argument being advanced here.
The thinly written Jill is certainly no match for, or answer to, Abe, who in putting (distorting) some of his philosophical beliefs to criminal ends evokes Leopold and Loeb, 1920s “thrill killers” who misread Nietzsche. The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over “Irrational Man” and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live. At one point, he includes a fairground scene, perhaps to evoke Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and its mad, murderous theorist. It makes for a nice shiver by proxy in a film that goes dark without going deep and keeps you wondering just how personal the title “Irrational Man” is or if it’s more of an existential shrug.
“Irrational Man” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Violence most foul.
Correction: July 30, 2015
A film review on July 17 about “Irrational Man” misidentified the method the character Abe uses to commit a crime. He uses poison, not a gun.
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