●●●○○
Woody Allen’s latest picture opens with a voiceover of Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Abe Lucas, discussing Kant. This sets the tone for the rest of Irrational Man, Allen’s mystery-murder-morality drama set in a pretty New Hampshire college. The New Yorker’s latest foray outside the Big Apple is an elegantly shot, gently paced study of existence, ethics and desire. So, geographically new territory; thematically, not so much.
Abe Lucas is a radical, disillusioned philosophy professor arriving at Braylin college, hoping to escape the misery of his wife leaving him and the trauma of watching his best friend get blown up (or was it beheaded? Nobody is sure!) in Iraq. Except, this is not quite a fresh start. In fact, Abe does not even arrive fresh: he is perpetually inebriated on single malt scotch, and the neurosis that traditionally plagues Allen’s protagonists is substituted here for existential boredom and apathy. He delivers his lectures with a mixture of maverickism and contempt, philosophising over the finer points of ethics and reason while blithely dismissing much of his subject as “verbal masturbation”. Phoenix, whose distinctively slurred speech and laid-back acting style has become his hallmark, makes for one of the most interesting male leads in any of Allen’s features, not only because of his charismatic screen presence, but also because of his honest and unusually serious performance.
Abe’s antics soon catch the attention of the whole campus, especially that of philosophy student Jill Pollard (Emma Stone), who becomes enthralled by the allure of her surly, wounded professor. Despite having an adoring, if uninspiring boyfriend (Jamie Blackley) she is unable to resist his complex demeanour and casual intellectualism. Similar aspects in earlier works like Manhattan, such as the student-teacher dynamic, are explored with greater depth and maturity here. Lucas resists the flirtations of his smitten student for longer than protagonists in any of Allen’s previous works. It is as if the director is better at exercising self-restraint when he is not actually playing the role himself.
While he tries to avoid falling in love with Jill, the temptation becomes too great and the pair enter into an explosive fling. His restored interest in life is spurred on by an overheard conversation of a woman whose crooked judge is about to give her ex-husband custody of her children. Enraged yet intrigued, Abe starts to ponder whether it would be morally justifiable to murder this judge if it meant improving this stranger’s life. What ensues is a murder plot somewhere between an Agatha Christie novel and a Bergman film.
The plot, which ambles for the first half, enjoys a welcome injection of adrenaline as Abe meticulously constructs the ‘perfect murder’. The professor’s attempts to rationalise his premeditated act of killing turn increasingly utilitarian and he soon morphs into a Travis Bickle-esque justice crusader, with this perverse raison d’être making the film’s title seem all the more ironically appropriate. This is Woody Allen at his most thoughtful and analytical; the auteur avoids trying to align the audience with Phoenix’s character, instead letting him unravel organically as he struggles to conceal his delight at his own genius.
In Irrational Man, Allen explores the complexity and arbitrariness of human morality in a more sophisticated, playful manner than anything since Crimes and Misdemeanors. Literary and philosophical references abound, mirroring Abe’s own ponderings on events, notably the aptly placed copies of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, the latter seemingly poking fun at the eponymous character. The soft photography lends it a 1970s aesthetic, and Phoenix and Stone are unsurprisingly superb together on screen. While the film delays in accelerating from its initially pedestrian pacing and the majority of the ancillary performances are rather one-dimensional, it is nonetheless one of the director’s richer works of recent years.
Irrational Man will be showing in the IFI from Friday, 11th of September.
