Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) is a sad sack—a philosophy professor whose life is running downhill and on empty, his inspiration exhausted and optimism shattered by experience. He has accepted a position at one of the Ivy League’s little league colleges, and like the doomed protagonist of a film noir, he is heading for trouble with no idea of what fate has prepared.
Abe is the most interesting of the two leads in Woody Allen’s latest film, Irrational Man. The other, Jill (Emma Stone), is a stock character from Allen’s universe as the much younger woman enchanted by the worldly, intellectual older man. Her generational peer boyfriend is a nice guy but seems callow compared to the professorial bad boy with a reputation for womanizing and provocative ideas. Abe compliments Jill on a class paper and they draw together (albeit platonically) in one of those early spring-early autumn romances beloved by the auteur. Only this time, there is a twist: The unaffable Abe threatens to sink into self-destruction and moral delusion.
Phoenix plays Abe with a sullen mumble channeled from Marlon Brando. He represents the intelligentsia turned on itself, reacting to the realization that the life of the mind, by itself, is unfulfilling. “Much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” he declares, not without reason. In his first classroom scene he subjects Immanuel Kant to a withering critique; that categorical imperative for total honesty is absurd in a world that is “nasty, ugly.” He has more sympathy for the Søren Kierkegaard but refuses the consolation the proto-Existentialist found in Christianity. Existentialism, with its idea of creating ourselves through our actions, appeals to him greatly—and yet all the actions he undertook for social justice around the world, whether in Darfur or Bangladesh, ran aground on indifference or corruption. The Russian novelists have become his sustenance, especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky. “He got it,” Abe tells Jill.
Irrational Man turns into a riff on Crime and Punishment. Overhearing a conversation at a diner about a corrupt, self-serving judge whose rulings have caused much harm, he decides to murder the jurist. The world would be better without him, Abe decides. The aesthetics of committing a perfect crime stimulate the professor. The “freedom” he finds in choosing to kill brings zest to his life, unstopping the creative plugs and the sexual impotence that have plagued him in recent years. Abe thinks he is taking control of his own life by taking another life. Naturally, “perfect crimes” are usually flawed and he becomes entangled in deepening moral dilemmas. Will Abe, like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, find salvation?
Irrational Man is more interesting for Abe’s murderous train of thought than its sexual-romantic themes or depiction of contemporary life. Anachronistically, Abe saunters around the grassy commons of his college, swigging Scotch from a flask and carrying on with his prize pupil as if it was a freewheeling campus from 1975, not the neo-Puritanical regime of 2015. Irrational Man isn’t great Woody Allen, but then, nowadays even a mediocre Allen film is at least more interesting than most of what Hollywood produces for consumption at the multiplex.
Opens July 31 at the Oriental Theatre, 2230 N. Farwell Ave.
Irrational Man
3 stars
Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone
Directed by Woody Allen
Rated R
