Woody Allen 2015 USA
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey, Jamie Blackley, Ethan Phillips, Betsey Aidem, Sophie von Haselberg
Woody Allen is one of a small band of film directors whose new releases I will always find a way to go and see at the cinema regardless of how patchy their recent output has been. In the past he's made an almost unmatchable number of masterpieces in a delightful banquet of genres and one of my top 10 of all time (Broadway Danny Rose) and, as such, he sort of has a pass with me that means I can accept him misfiring sometimes. This being said I am not blind to his faults, and there are many. His most recent work Irrational Man could easily be described as one of them but it's intriguing none the less; the story of a jaded philosophy professor with one foot in the grave and the other too despondent to cling on rediscovering his zest for life via the devotion of a sparky younger woman and an unusual take on the morality of murder, it at first sounds like a retread of Allen's sometimes questionable cinematic past with a leading role on loan from his already richly plundered back catalogue, one that Allen himself could (and would) play in a second. The twist is that he doesn't and in fact the existentially challenged but apparently irresistible chief arse is inhabited by Joaquin Phoenix, another huge Hollywood star not afraid to plunge into independent waters and play with his own public perception. For once he isn't merely an Allen surrogate with a fast mouth and a slow thyroid either, he's quieter, distracted, lacks the self-skewering yet strangely arrogant patter that might be expected - in fact for the first half hour he struggles to talk at all, exchanging the life he sees pissing away for firewater and misanthropy, inward-facing ennui. Likewise he's apparently not that interested in women, shyly brushing off Parker Posey's hot-to-trot fellow tutor and answering spoken-for pupil Jill's adoration by muttering that he's too far gone to appreciate her and recommending that she stay with her hapless but thoroughly decent boyfriend. You can't help but agree with him even if Allen doesn't, after all despite most women wanting to unravel him and fuck him (not necessarily in that order) and every man on the face of the earth laying helplessly jealous in his wake he's (at least until an epiphany halfway through) a permanently sodden, passive intellectual with an ever-expanding gut and a semi-functioning penis who mostly spouts the clichéd chestnuts of an amateur faker. He is however Allen's darkest character since 2004's Melina and Melinda and fittingly the film is almost wholly dramatic, one scene involving drunk teenagers boasting about Russian Roulette is particularly alarming when Abe (Phoenix), invited there in an attempt to jolly him up, puts the gun to his temple and pulls the trigger four times in front of a mortified post-teen audience, laughing as Jill tries to talk him out of it. Here Phoenix is stunning even as the younger actors half-heartedly deliver their stilted lines but later outdoes himself, silently walking away from the site of his simultaneous downfall and liberation with a look of sheer terror that feels jarring yet somehow relatable. Stone isn't in the same league but never really had much of a chance given that Jill has little to her personality other than sycophantism and dullness. As with her turn in last year's dreadful Magic In The Moonlight she's also constantly portrayed as the intellectual lesser of the far older object of her affections, once again a man who isn't that interested in her when the film starts but ends up enamoured enough to seek to improve and control her. Her final realisation here could be seen as a counterpoint to the sexist submission of her Sophie at the end of that film, Stone getting her revenge or something, but the ease with which Jill shrugs off the catastrophe of the finale suggests again that she's either become as ethically bankrupt as Abe or she's just thinly created. That Allen has taken such a disturbingly outdated attitude to his latest muse for the second time in a row isn't only disappointing but also shows that his disconnect with the modern world isn't always as charming as it can seem. His script isn't as skilful as it really should be either; he's quick to write off 90% of philosophy as verbal masturbation but spends three quarters of the film holding it in high esteem, taking in discussions about intellectualism, flawed morality, Kant, the will to survive and Hannah Arendt's theory on the banality of evil; his female characters are weak-willed, unreliable and can only see Abe as their salvation; in perhaps his biggest failing he makes his plot twists so easy to predict they could be on loan from an ITV sitcom. For such a bleak narrative the film also feels too glossy and Allen's trademark upbeat jazz score is simply out-of-place. When it first appears you expect a witty farce but there are no jokes, no one-liners and the tone is rarely less than utterly troubling, by the end it's just annoying and gives the impression of a soundtrack thrown together haphazardly to allow Allen to move on to his next project. The knowledge that he can make films as exceptional as Blue Jasmine but follow them with two of the most pitiful of his career somehow makes it worse. Mundane.