Forty-five features into his half-century of moviemaking, the obsessions distinguishing Woody Allen’s furtive protagonists — luck, fate, chance, getting away with murder — have extended more and more to Allen’s screenwriting.
A mixture of the obvious and the indecisive, “Irrational Man” stars Joaquin Phoenix as philosophy professor Abe Lucas, new arrival to fictional Braylin College. He’s notorious for being a drunk, a womanizer, a provocateur. Emma Stone is one of his students, Jill Pollard, drawn to Abe’s brooding pessimism and self-destruction because it is so, so infernally sexy.
Abe and Jill take turns narrating the plot at us in voiceover. Around the midpoint the film introduces the latest in Allen’s “perfect murder” scenarios. Abe and Jill overhear a conversation about a corrupt family-court judge and a woman losing custody of her children. Abe decides to act as anonymous sinner-saint. The film’s second half chronicles the execution of Abe’s murderous deed and the aftermath.
Allen is no dummy, but he is also not his own best editor or critic. The tone here is all over the place — Viagra jokes up against plodding, second-hand philosophical disquisitions. Stone responds to the material with some effective ambiguity in her reaction shots, in between the lines, but both she and Phoenix are playing not-quite-humans, and Phoenix can barely get through some of the clumsier dialogue.
