IRRATIONAL MAN
Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: A-
Director: Woody Allen
Screenwriter: Woody Allen
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 6/18/15
Opens: July 17, 2015
There are many excuses that defendants have for committing murder, and the typical judge in criminal court must have heard ‘em all. “Twinkies made me do it” (Dan White); “The Devil made me do it” (Adam and Eve); “I stood my ground” (George Zimmerman); “I feared for my life” (Officer Darren Wilson); “They were making too much noise” (Michael David Dunn); “I was sexually molested” (Lorie Hino-Boddie). “I was drunk;” “I was drugged;” “I had a bad childhood;” “I was high;” “I was low.”
Here’s one the judges hadn’t heard. “Jean-Paul Sartre made me do it.” Not just Sartre. He had accomplices like Heidigger and Kant and the whole school of existentialists. Throw in Dostoevsky as well. Woody Allen, who wrote and directed this, his forty-fifth film, does not accuse Sartre directly. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that some writers and thinkers who earn their fame and income from words say that you are defined not by what you think or what you say or what you write, but by your actions. You act and therefore you are.
And who would take these thinkers more seriously than Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), a new member of the philosophy department at Rhode Island’s fictional Braylin College (filmed by Darius Khondji at Salve Regina University in Newport). Lucas was preceded by his reputation as a ladies’ man whose wife allegedly left him for his best friend and who had witnessed horrors like watching a pal get blown up in Iraq from a land mine and who went to Darfur and also to post-Katrina New Orleans only to conclude that he accomplished nothing. Having abandoned hope to save anyone, he gave up on life, sipping regularly from his hip flask and walking throughout much of the film in an alcoholic haze. Not that this prevents him from gaining the affection of students in his Ethical Strategies class, particularly pretty Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), and from faculty members like Rita Richards (Parker Posey in her signature nutty vibes). Rita throws herself at him, while Jill, temporarily ignoring the love of her boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley), is head over heels for the professor and tries mightily to get him to bed her.
If Abe keeps both women at arms’ length it’s not that he finds them unattractive. Since discovering that the world seems not to need him, that his is powerless to make change, he has become temporarily impotent and understands that the problem is strictly psychological. But circumstances change in a diner when he and Jill overhear people at the next table. A woman is frustrated that her estranged husband may be granted full custody of their children thanks to a corrupt judge named Spangler (Tom Kemp), a 61-year-old who follows the same pattern each week. Once a week he plays Bridge with the fellows, and on Saturdays he jogs in the park, then sits down with an orange juice and a newspaper. Stalking the judge, Abe plans to murder him. He is now finally committed to an action that could succeed, a perfect murder that will help a stranger, a plan that invigorates him, cures his sexual problem with both women, and enables him to get a big breakfast of French Toast and bacon instead of just coffee. He loses his intellectual block and chooses an existential act which despite its repugnance to society does a world of good for the college teacher.
“Irrational Man” does not have any of the magic realism of the wonderful “Midnight in Paris,” which like this film has dialogue that conjures up names of celebrated figures of the past. But it’s an easy match in crime fiction for “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (a mistress threatens to reveal their affair to the man’s wife) and can be seen as a reflection on the director’s fear of mortality. Light moments exist throughout, particularly when Parker Posey comes on to the professor, and acting talent on exhibit in marvelous. Emma Stone, fresh from her role as Sophie in “Magic in the Moonlight,” about an Englishman called in to unmask a charlatan, is incredibly charming as a student in love with her much older teacher now serving as his confidante, while Joaquin Phoenix is ideal as a man who for half the movie is dead from the next down and who finds meaning in life only when he contemplates murder.
Rated R. 94 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – A-
Acting – A
Technical – A-
Overall – A-