Woody Allen (2015)
The protagonist of Irrational Man is a philosophy professor called Abe Lucas, who takes up an appointment at Braylin, a (fictional) liberal arts college in New England. Abe’s arrival is anticipated with interest by prospective colleagues: it seems that he’s a big, somewhat controversial name in his field. In the event, and although he proves popular with his students, Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) cuts a pretty abject figure on the campus – dishevelled, paunchy, distrait. He isolates himself from other academics, with the exception of Rita Richards (Parker Posey), a chemistry professor who immediately makes a play for Abe. He drinks too much. He has writer’s block and corresponding difficulties having sex, as Rita discovers when they go to bed. Abe has been described in some reviews of Irrational Man as suffering ‘an existential crisis’ – a rather grand way of saying that he’s generally fed up. Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), one of his students, has a crush on Abe; she talks about him so continuously that it gets on the nerves of her amiable boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley), a fellow student. Although Abe is careful to avoid a sexual relationship with Jill, they increasingly spend extra-curricular time together. One day, in a diner, they eavesdrop on a conversation taking place immediately behind them. A distraught woman is telling friends that she fears losing her children in an upcoming custody case with her ex-husband because the family court judge who will make the ruling is prejudiced and unethical. Abe Lucas makes up his mind to kill the judge.
Abe’s life is treading water until he overhears the woman in the diner and so is the film. Up to this point, Irrational Man’s slight charm consists in the expectedness of its limitations – the limitations, that is, of Woody Allen realising on screen a twenty-first century higher education campus. The woman who shows Abe round on his arrival at Braylin explains – to a man of forty – the availability of ‘computer technology, if you’re into that’. (Allen is now, in some ways, so culturally behind the times that you feel his present-day stories should really be set several decades in the past – the period of his film-making prime.) Professor Lucas – on the evidence of the lectures that we hear from him – has a philosophical frame of reference derived not from academic study and research but from Woody Allen movies. Nevertheless, once Abe is seized by the possibilities of the ‘creative existential act’ of committing murder, you want to know how things will work out. For two reasons: first, for purposes of comparison with other Allen films in which a principal character is responsible for the killing of another, especially Crimes and Misdemeanors; second, because it should be interesting to watch Joaquin Phoenix playing a man who, through bringing about a death, enjoys a new lease of life.
As you’d also expect from latterday Woody Allen, the plotting around Abe’s crime and its aftermath is careless. In the diner, it’s Jill who initially overhears the conversation going on behind her. At this point, Abe is sitting opposite Jill but she gestures frantically to him to come and sit beside her: it’s not at all clear – in relation to Jill’s personality or her understanding of Abe’s (as distinct from Allen’s need to move the story forward) – why she’s so anxious for Abe to hear what the agitated woman is saying. Abe starts to follow Judge Spangler around and observes his Saturday morning routine: after jogging, Spangler always sits on the same park bench to drink juice that he buys from a stall nearby and to read his newspaper. Having decided to poison the juice and switch plastic cups while the judge is reading, Abe obtains Rita’s key to the Braylin chemistry lab (without her knowing it) and cyanide from the store in the lab. While he’s getting the poison, he’s interrupted by another female student; we know from her earlier appearance in the film that this girl is naive but it’s surprising – given how much interest Abe has attracted at Braylin – that the philosopher’s bizarre after-hours appearance in the lab store isn’t soon the talk of the campus. Abe and Jill (who knows nothing of what he’s done) celebrate the news of Judge Spangler’s death, which is assumed to be from natural causes. Sometime later, Abe is in conversation with Rita when Jill rushes up to tell him that an autopsy has discovered the cyanide in Spangler’s corpse. Rita, already suspicious of Jill as a sexual rival, is miffed by this intervention – a fact that seems to have been forgotten when, later on, Jill learns from Rita her ‘crackpot theory’ (based on the temporary loss of her lab key) that Abe is responsible for the judge’s death. Jill follows this up by searching for incriminating evidence in Abe’s rooms while he’s out. He’s been pretty careful to avoid suspicion until now but he makes things very easy for Jill by leaving a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment open on his desk, with passages annotated and Spangler’s name pencilled in the margins.
Never mind: the murder gives heart and momentum to Irrational Man and to Joaquin Phoenix an opportunity that he doesn’t waste. Phoenix is a rather unusual presence in a Woody Allen film: his brooding, listless quality in the early stages contrasts amusingly with the more tightly defined characterisations orbiting him. He’s put on weight for the role (the size of his gut makes him look pregnant in some shots); his performance might be even more enjoyable if he’d slimmed down again for when Abe has been re-energised by the act of ridding the world of a person he’s convinced it’s better off without. (The murder also enables Abe to recover his love-making abilities; and, when Roy breaks up with Jill, she and Abe start a physical relationship.) Even so, Joaquin Phoenix is absorbing as he expresses Abe’s inner satisfaction with what he’s achieved and his intellectual pleasure in walking the tightrope of keeping the achievement secret. Abe plans to leave Braylin and go to Europe with Rita but Jill’s discovery of the Dostoyevsky interrupts his preparations. She threatens to go to the police if he doesn’t, so Abe decides to dispatch Jill too. He once mentioned to her the succession of jobs he had as a young man, including working as a lift operator. He is therefore able to rig a lift shaft, which he tries to push Jill down. In the ensuing struggle, a flashlight falls from her bag; Abe slips on it and into the lift and plummets to his own death. In other words, chance determines the outcome; this is par for the course in recent Woody Allen films but the struggle between Abe and Jill on the edge of the lift is startlingly dynamic. I also liked the fact that a neat piece of writer’s forethought, rather than the operation of blind chance, really determined the outcome. The flashlight is the gift Jill decides on when Abe wins a prize for her on a visit to a fairground earlier in the story. (‘Very practical choice’, he tells her at the time.)
The story is narrated by both Abe and Jill – until he dies. This dual voiceover feels a bit of a cheat: it’s one thing for a dead person to narrate their own story, another for a double act – one of whom survives while the other doesn’t – to do so. The denouement of Irrational Man is interestingly different from that of Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which Martin Landau’s Judah Rosenthal eventually manages to avoid both legal penalty for his crime and a guilty conscience. Twenty-five years on, Woody Allen opts for a morally more conventional way out. Not only is Abe hoist with his own petard; Allen also seems to prefer the relatively dull, sweet innocuousness of the relationship between Jill and Roy, which Jill decides she’s better off with. Her final monologue – she explains that she got over the trauma gradually as time passed – feels tame: how tame probably depends a lot on how you feel about Emma Stone. This is the second Woody Allen film running in which Stone has appeared (after Magic in the Moonlight) so it seems fair to assume that he sees a lot more in her than I can see. As usual, she’s expert, alert but – except when Jill is literally fighting for her life – frictionless. Jamie Blackley does well in the thankless task of playing Roy; so does Parker Posey in the larger but still obvious role of Rita. Tom Kemp is excellent as the ill-fated Judge Spangler: the self-satisfaction Kemp exudes in his brief appearances as a jogger ensures that the judge is as dislikeable in person as the aggrieved woman in the diner made him out to be.
17 September 2015