Irra­tional Man

A dark com­e­dy of the con­science, Irra­tional Man is effec­tive­ly Woody Allen’s How Stel­la Got Her Groove Back, though – for alco­holic and recent­ly impo­tent phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) – the process of groove recov­ery isn’t quite so inno­cent as fly­ing to Jamaica for a fling with a local hunk named Win­ston Shake­speare. For Abe, whose pot­bel­ly alone is hefti­er than sev­er­al of Allen’s recent films, rein­vig­o­rat­ing his life might require end­ing some­one else’s.

For some time now, it’s been a self-evi­dent truth that Woody Allen movies have come to exist only in rela­tion­ship to one anoth­er, as the char­ac­ters with which he pop­u­lates them exist only in rela­tion to him­self. This isn’t a new phe­nom­e­non, and no one famil­iar with the iner­tia of the iconoclast’s work­ing life would ever expect his forty-sixth fea­ture to change that. It doesn’t. In its best moments, Irra­tional Man has the unchar­ac­ter­is­tic temer­i­ty to ques­tion itself, or at least the chutz­pah to con­vince you that it might.

There’s some­thing very wrong with Abe, with Phoenix inhab­it­ing the role like the lovechild Doc Sportel­lo and Whit Still­man prob­a­bly nev­er even tried to have. Hired to teach a sum­mer course at a promi­nent Rhode Island uni­ver­si­ty, he rolls onto cam­pus in the throes of an exis­ten­tial cri­sis, a flask­ful of scotch in his jack­et and a voiceover para­phras­ing Kant in his head (“Man is con­front­ed with ques­tions he can­not answer or dismiss…”).

He stands up like he’s falling over, and the first thing that almost every per­son says to him is, ​“Are you okay?” He is not okay. Worse, he’s impo­tent. Jill Pol­lard (Emma Stone, ebul­lient as ever), the tall girl with the big eyes in the sec­ond row, is deter­mined to remind Abe that life is worth think­ing about and tak­ing seriously.

For a time, it seems like Irra­tional Man is play­ing into the hands of Allen’s most reflex­ive detrac­tors, and that Jill’s youth­ful piz­zazz will stiff­en Abe right back into shape. Liv­ing in con­stant fear of her own ordi­nar­i­ness, Jill can’t help but be attract­ed to Abe’s sense of resid­ual world­li­ness. When Abe glum­ly con­fess­es to her that he’d be too far gone to appre­ci­ate a new woman in his life, Jill per­ceives it as a per­son­al challenge.

That’s when things take a turn. While at a din­er one after­noon, Abe and Jill over­hear a woman cry­ing to her friends about the crooked judge who’s going to deprive her of cus­tody to her kids. For Jill, it’s one hell of a sob sto­ry. For Abe, it’s his Strangers on a Train eure­ka moment. Sud­den­ly, his life has renewed pur­pose: he’s going to kill that judge, and he’s going to feel great about it. As the sum­mer winds on, all Jill can think about is Abe, and all Abe can think about is murder.

Irra­tional Man can be seen as one of Allen’s clever­est films, and it’s cer­tain­ly among his most focused, but even the sat­is­fy­ing tidi­ness of its end­ing con­tributes to the sense that we’re watch­ing a sim­u­la­tion rather than a sto­ry. Still, there’s an imp­ish plea­sure in see­ing what Jill has learned by the end of the semes­ter, and in how she’s learned it. The film’s cold, lin­ger­ing irony is that Abe Lucas might just be the best teacher she’ll ever have.