Movie Review: Irrational Man

By Pamela Zoslov



In 2008, Woody Allen said that he isn't an intellectual. “I'm basically a low-culture person,” he said to a group of film critics, including me. "I'm not saying I'm an insensitive Neanderthal. But basically, I'm the guy who's watching the playoffs and drinking a Beck's. I'm not at the opera. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of people thinking I'm an intellectual." Here is what I wrote at the time:


If fans have mistaken a beer-drinking, Knicks-watchings shlub for an intellectual, it's understandable: Allen's movies are studded with references to Kafka, Freud and Tolstoy, and his filmography includes homages to Bergman and Fellini. But beneath it all, he insists, beats the heart of a comedy writer. During his nightclub days, audiences assumed, based on his bookish appearance, that he was an academic type, and the persona stuck. When he wrote jokes, he says, it seemed funny to drop names like "Kierkegaard." "I learned to utilize the intellectual patois," he says. "It's just a skill. People think of me seriously than I really am.” (Sadly, many people — myself firmly excluded — now have darker opinions of Woody Allen.)


Allen's new film, his 50^th by the way, is Irrational Man. It gives voice to Allen's lifelong philosophical questing, while also laughing at itself for doing so. The screenplay doesn't merely drop the names of Kierkegaard and Kant and Heidegger and Nietzsche, it wrestles extensively with issues of ethics, existence, morality and meaning.


The seeker is Abe Lucas, a philosophy professor played by Joaquin Phoenix. Lucas joins the faculty of Braylin, a liberal-arts college in Rhode Island, and his reputation precedes him. Dark, moody and handsome, Abe is said to be haunted by a divorce, or the death of his friend in Iraq, who was beheaded or, alternately, stepped on a land mine. Abe drinks to excess and broods ceaselessly. Jill (Emma Stone), a gifted undergraduate, is particularly taken with the troubled professor, to the annoyance of her boyfriend, Roy (Jamie Blackley). Roy predicts, accurately, that Jill will fall in love with Abe.


Jill, however, has competition for Abe's affections. Rita (Parker Posey), an unhappily married science professor, determines to get Abe into her bed. Rita also wants to run away with Abe to Spain, a destination she considers “romantic.”


Blocked as a writer and as a lover, Abe is too tormented to perform sexually with Rita, who offers to “unblock” him. For a while, Abe even resists becoming more than friends with his smitten student, Jill. The college community witnesses the depth of Abe's gloom when Jill and Roy take him to a party, where he plays a one-man game of Russian Roulette, spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger not once, but twice.


His behavior is alarming, but it's catnip to Jill. “He's so self-destructive, but so brilliant,” she muses. “There's something about his pain that's exciting. He's truly an original thinker.” Allen winks at the romantic naïvete of young women, but also makes Jill the smartest person in the film, the only one who sees what's going on.


At a diner one day, Abe and Jill overhear a conversation that inspires Abe to consider something radical: committing a murder. With echoes of Crime and Punishment, Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, the plan to commit a seemingly motiveless murder rejuvenates Abe. Suddenly he has a zest for life and love and sex and hearty breakfasts. He even wins a prize for Jill at an amusement park (that setting also recalling Strangers on a Train). Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Abe feels like an extraordinary man, one whose act of killing will make the world a better place. He's thrilled to be making transition from “man of thought” to “man of action.” He stalks his prey, feeling fully alive while planning to take a life. What seemed like genius now looks like madness.


“Murder comedy” is something Allen does well, notably in the Marshall Brickman collaboration Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). This latest dark comedy is a little thinner, and a bit abrupt in its ending, but it's beautifully made, as always with Allen, whose basic filmmaking craftsmanship is often taken for granted. The plot is brisk and absorbing, the casting is perfection, and the music — classic mid-'60s jazz by the Ramsey Lewis Trio — could not be more apt. 

Curb Your Expectations

As an actor, Larry David is a great comedy writer. His blunt, declamatory line readings on Curb Your Enthusiasm make you appreciate how well Jason Alexander channeled David’s neuroses on Seinfeld. Surprisingly, David is a pretty serviceable Woody Allen surrogate in Allen’s latest, Whatever Works, which finds Allen on New York home turf after a string of movies set in England and Spain. Casting about for a new movie, Allen dusted off and updated a script he wrote in the’70s for Zero Mostel.

The great Zero is long dead, so we have David as Boris Yellnikov, the misanthropic ex-physicist who rants against everything from religion to love and dismisses most human beings as “incompetent morons” and “inchworms.” “The basic teachings of Jesus and Karl Marx — all great ideas with one fatal flaw,” he declaims. “The fallacious notion that people are fundamentally decent.” The persona is as familiar as a cranky old friend, and while Woody is still best at inhabiting it, David is far from the worst fit — that honor would go to Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity, hands down.

The story is a sporadically funny farce centering on Boris, a divorced hermit who walks with a limp after a failed suicide attempt (he hit a canopy after jumping out a window) and spends his days waxing philosophical with his friends (Michael McKean, Adam Brooks, Lyle Kanouse) and teaching chess to children, which provides the opportunity for funny scenes of Boris verbally abusing the kids.

One night Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a pretty teenage runaway from the South, appears at the doorstep of his dismal apartment. Boris, who has given up even on sex, is reluctant to take her in, but schools her in his obsessions and attitudes, which she adopts with precision. He marries the girl, and her honeyed optimism has a tonic effect on him. The farce cranks up when Melodie’s mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) arrives, her Bible Belt faith providing a target for Boris’ unending derision. Manhattan is seductive to Marietta, who transforms herself into a bohemian artiste. Her estranged husband (Ed Begley Jr.), comes looking for her and finds a new identity in the big city as well. As always with Allen’s romances, the young woman tires of her cranky, neurotic older mate, and a series of un-couplings and re-couplings occur. The redemptive finale, reminiscent of Hannah and Her Sisters, is unexpectedly uplifting.

We could quibble for days over Allen’s recurrent themes of older males romancing inappropriately young females (a scene in which Boris sits with the camisole-clad girl watching Fred Astaire on TV is iconic), and admittedly it’s a strange fixation in art and in life. Some people still have not forgiven him for what they perceive as his sins, but his attitude is reasonably expressed by the movie’s title.


(A shorter version of this appeared on the Cleveland Scene website.)

Ladies of Spain

The advance buzz on Woody Allen’s latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, was that it featured a hot lesbian sex scene between Scarlett Johannson and Penélope Cruz. The gossipers should have known better: Woody Allen movies are seldom about sex. Relationships, yes. Art and philosophy, certainly. But erotic heat is just not his thing.

The slight but enjoyable film does include a brief Sapphic dalliance, mostly rendered offscreen. But overall it is less about sex than love — Allen’s love of Barcelona, a city he describes as “full of visual beauty and quite romantic.”

It seems to me that Woody Allen movies have been greeted in recent years with responses ranging from indifference to outright hostility. Maybe some people still haven’t forgiven his “heart wants what it wants” justification for marrying his former girlfriend’s daughter (now 38 and mother of their two adopted children). Others may be disappointed that his films are so much smaller in scope than his early, ambitious works. His late career resembles that of Rossini, who retired from composing grand operas to write smaller, more intimate pieces. This one we might call “Serenade to a City in Spain.”

The movie finds Allen in a lighter mood than in last year’s tense British murder drama Cassandra’s Dream. The story, with narration by actor Christopher Evan Welch instead of Allen’s familiar voice, tells of two friends, dark-haired, sensible Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and blond, impulsive Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), who share a summer vacation, and a lover, in Barcelona.

Vicky is a graduate student whose interest in art and architecture gives Allen the opportunity to drop names like Gaudi and Miró into the script. She is engaged to marry ambitious, reliable Doug (Chris Messina). Cristina, restless and vaguely artistic, is trying to get over a painful breakup. They stay with Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn), the kind of smart, successful couple who are a staple of Woody Allen films.

At an art gallery opening (another Allen staple), Vicky and Cristina spot Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem), a handsome painter who recently ended a violent marriage. At a restaurant, Juan Antonio approaches the Vicky and Cristina and suggests they join him on a weekend trip to Oviedo, where his plans include admiring the city’s pre-Romanesque architecture and making love — “hopefully the three of us.” Vicky is justifiably skeptical, but Cristina accepts, and Vicky reluctantly agrees to go along.

When Juan Antonio’s seduction of Cristina goes awry, he and Vicky enjoy the old city together, and one night make passionate love. After their return to Barcelona, Juan Antonio, to Vicky’s disappointment, takes up with Cristina, who moves in with him. Vicky resigns herself to marrying Doug, who seems, by contrast, hopelessly dull.

Cristina and Juan Antonio’s romantic idyll is interrupted when he is forced to rescue his suicidal ex-wife Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Juan Antonio moves his fiery ex into the house, and after some initial mistrust, the three fall into a comfortable ménage. Maria Elena, a painter even more talented than her ex-husband, helps Cristina develop her photography skills. Maria Elena and Juan Antonio, a couple seemingly modeled on Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, decide that Cristina is the “missing ingredient” in their troubled relationship. Later, Judy, who is herself unhappily married, tries to help Vicky reignite the flame with Juan Antonio. The result is an absurd twist of fate characteristic of a Woody Allen short story.

It’s a mere wisp of a movie, but the clever, talky script and fine cast make it go down like a cool glass of limonada. Lissome English actress Rebecca Hall, who was in the underrated Cassandra's Dream, is a credibly American Vicky, and Cruz is ravishing and funny as the temperamental Maria Elena. Bardem, with his soft brown eyes, has guileless appeal in a role that happily doesn’t require a Monkees haircut and bolt gun.

I remain baffled, however, over Allen’s continued allegiance to Johansson, whose reciting of his artistic-intellectual dialogue about such things as Scriabin piano sonatas brings to mind a toddler scuffling about in mommy’s heels. Nonetheless, at the movie's recent Los Angeles premiere, Allen pronounced her "one of the great American actresses." Johansson is the kind of child-woman Allen often idealizes in his movies, but is, I think, the least talented of any of the actresses he has cast. Maybe Allen sees something in her the rest of us can't. Or perhaps the explanation lies in the line Juan Antonio purrs seductively at Cristina: “You have very beautiful lips.”

This appeared in a slightly different version in the Cleveland Scene.