Irrational Man movie review & film summary (2015)

The biggest problem is the script—or what passes for the script. "Irrational Man" has been directed by Allen with  characteristic grace and economy (he's been a better director than writer for about twenty years), and it has been acted with what could be described as heroic resourcefulness; in scene after scene, Phoenix and his costars strive to create characters that seem plausibly human, and occasionally succeed. There are other compensatory virtues as well, including Daris Khondji's leafy widescreen images of Rhode Island, and a lively needle-drop score anchored by The Ramsey Lewis Trio, which lends a Kubrickian chill to the talk of despair, alcoholism and murder.

But every good effort by cast and crew is undone by Allen's disorganized, boringly declamatory screenplay, which often sounds like a bad impersonation of Allen's dialogue by somebody who has listened to his films with a superficial ear, and come away thinking that the key to sounding smart is dropping great thinkers' names and oversimplifying their thoughts. Both characters have voice-over narration as well. When the voice-over isn't making observations that require no prompting ("A lot was very wrong with Abe") it's describing actions mere seconds before or after they're performed by the characters, as if providing its own narration track for the blind.

Abe is the film's number one purveyor of tone-deaf assertions that are misleading at best, cut-and-pasted at worst, like "Kant would agree that in a truly just world, there's no room for lying" and "Doestoevsky got it" and "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" (a Kierkegaard crib). And Abe is so oblivious to how full-of-it he sounds that he ramps up to  proclamations with phrases like, "You know, Simone de Beauvoir once posited, quite correctly..."

If Abe were supposed to be a college educated twit like Diane Keaton's character in "Manhattan," his manner of speaking would make dramatic sense even as, to paraphrase Allen's character in the latter film, you fantasized about knocking his other contact lens out. But Abe is supposed to be a philosophy professor of some renown, albeit one who has fallen on hard times thanks to depression, a drinking problem, and an inability to keep Abe, Jr., in his pants. In fact, Abe is supposed to be so impressive that colleagues and supervisors look past his painfully obvious and socially unacceptable alcoholism (he blithely swigs from a flask in public, like a high school kid trying to seem reckless and dark) and approach him at parties to say things like, "I loved your essay on situational ethics." ("Thank you," Abe replies, "It caused a little controversy with the philosophy department at Adair"—whereupon, in my dreams, the movie cuts to Woody Allen being handed a trophy for writing the clumsiest expository sentence of all time.)

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