Another
year means yet another Woody Allen film, and more importantly, another chance
for admirers of his work to bask in the characters he creates. Working again
with the radiant Emma Stone after their previous collaboration Magic in the
Moonlight, this time Joaquin Phoenix joins Allen as the irrational man of the
title. Long time fans of the director can expect much of the same from this
film, but Irrational Man finds the auteur on particularly light-footed form in
its frothy tale of love and murder.
Phoenix
takes the lead as Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor whose reputation as he
moves to a new college precedes him. He is there to teach, to write and to
drink as much as he can between delivering lectures. Emma Stone is the student
in his class who becomes infatuated with Abe and his bleak, but brilliant
intellect. Stone's smart Jill catches the attention of Abe with a particularly
original paper, and the pair become friends, complicated by Jill's boyfriend's
understandable jealousy and Abe's developing relationship with another
lecturer. Abe's complete loss of purpose in his life may be a strange part of
his charm but it is soon to be interrupted when he hatches a plan to help a
complete stranger by murdering a corrupt judge.
What starts
out as a rather predictable looking romance takes a sharp turn when Abe and
Jill overhear a conversation at a nearby table in a diner. From here, Allen
balances the romantic elements with an altogether more interesting and
outlandish murder plot. Several little twists and turns later, and Allen has
dispatched an amusing morality play with some standout scenes sewn into his
brusquely paced screenplay.
While the
film starts out with Phoenix rattling out voiceover that couldn't be any more
clearly written in Allen's distinctive voice, the characters soon start to
develop. Phoenix seems to have stumbled in, still stoned from the set of
Inherent Vice, and does a wonderful job of investing Abe with a believable and
not completely unsympathetic misery born out of having lost hope that he can
actually make a difference in the world. Emma Stone also gets her own
voiceover, and her Jill eventually emerges as the real hero of the film.
However, Phoenix gets the more interesting role as he finds a renewed lust for
life, and a cure for his impotence, when he decides to kill a judge out of
kindness to someone that he has never met. This perfect murder gives him
purpose and his transformation from paunchy slob to charismatic anti-hero is a
pleasure to watch.
While the
love affairs take a backseat to the planning, performing and aftermath of the
murder, Irrational Man is irresistibly silly fun. When keeping the intellectual
mumblings of academics to a minimum, and revelling in Phoenix's responses to
those who are trying to decipher the method and motive for the murder,
Irrational Man comes alive. It's occasionally sweet, frequently silly and
features a great slapstick death scene, but really this is Allen coasting on
mostly familiar ground. Same time, next year?
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