Woody needs to stick with comedy, and crime as a sidebar.
Irrational Man
Grade: B-
Director: Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris)
Screenplay: Allen
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix (Her), Emma Stone (Magic in the Moonlight)
Rating: R
Runtime: 96 min.
by John DeSando
"He was so damn interesting." Jill (Emma Stone), VO.
There he goes again, Woody that is. Kant, Heidegger, Dostoevsky—the usual suspects in the Woody Allen pantheon of intellectuals he loves to have his nerdy, conflicted protagonists mention and make the rest of us feel inadequate. Irrational Man is an irrational hodge-podge of philosophies placing conflict between emotion and reason.
Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) comes to a small college as a well-known philosopher. He is particularly interested in how one becomes actively engaged in life, in an existential way, because he definitely has lost his will to be happy. Now plenty of women are ready to make him appreciate life, most notably Jill (Emma Stone), one of his bright students, and because this is a Woody Allen movie, his lover.
Naughty college prof gets away with courting her in front of the entire community, another Woodman fiction or wish fulfillment. But, hey, he’s the writer-director of this slightly dark comedy that becomes a thriller. Well, not a great thriller, just a small one wherein tortured prof becomes alive when he plans a murder. See, he’s becoming a real human being with his decisions that will identify him as Abe, in an existential way. Only problem is the crime, which is not the way most of us determine our character.
The first part of the film, full of philosophical superficialities, is entertaining in a Woody way while the philosopher amazes the community with his melancholic wit and seduces his student. As the film moves into the thriller phase and she has to deal with the fact that her brainy teacher is a murderer, the Woodmeister charm loses to the machinations of murder, much more awkward than other murder mysteries such as Match Point and less entertaining than the romance, which is Allen’s forte anyway.
Yet, Abe does become irrational as the film does. It ends up being a second-rate comedy thriller from the writing-directing first-rate mind of Woody Allen. Perhaps he wants to activate Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” which he makes sure we see in the murderer’s marginal notes to an edition of Crime and Punishment.
I’ll take his challenges and his weak movies over most of the thrillers this summer. On the Other hand,The Gift, the best thriller of the summer, is a true psychological horror show—that is, it is what it is, existentially speaking.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
