Above:
Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone in Mr. Allen’s latest. Photo ©Sony Pictures Classics
More than once in Woody
Allen’s morbid parlor picture “Irrational Man,” Professor Abe Lucas takes a
stroll on the beach. And why shouldn’t
he? He’s a depressed intellectual; such
creatures must crave the sight of sun-crested waves. Yet Mr. Allen’s half funny, half leeringly
toxic movie makes those blue waters look oddly menacing. They are not included, I think, for our
sightseeing pleasure, but as a metaphor for the sometimes volatile course of
fate, or something.
Fate is a subject that “Irrational Man” obsesses
over. It’s likely what brings Abe to the
film’s venue, a dusty East Coast college brimming with pupils played by
attractive youngsters like Jamie Blackley and Emma Stone. Because this is a Woody Allen movie, Ms.
Stone’s Jill immediately forms a much-denied crush on Abe, who likes to slosh
his rambling lectures over his bulbous beer belly.
Abe broods as lustily as the characters Mr. Phoenix has
seamlessly inhabited in films like “Walk the Line,” “Two Lovers,” “The Master,”
“Her,” and “The Immigrant” (he maps the contours of the male soul more
skillfully than most other living actors).
Yet the character is also resolutely idealistic and cruel. Early in the film, Abe overhears a middle-aged
woman tearfully confessing that a corrupt judge might wrest her children from
her. In a pinch, Abe takes matters into
his own galumphing palms by stalking the judge and concocting a sickening,
guiltily entertaining scheme.
In other words, “Irrational Man” is not a standard-model
Woody Allen movie—it is one of his off-brand dramas (in the mold of “Blue
Jasmine” and “Match Point”), and a satisfying philosophical bauble at that. Drained of the limp theatrics of last year’s Allen
offering, “Magic in the Moonlight,” the newer film is assuaged not only by
sublime images (the cinematographer, Darius Khonji, makes each moment glow like
scoops of pale sorbet), but its ability to toy with our sympathies as Abe grows
increasingly amoral in his quest for the proverbial greater good.
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