It’s no surprise that a Woody Allen picture, while adding to the auteur’s critically acclaimed filmography, also effectively serves as the writer/director’s own version of self-therapy. Wrapped up in the comic absurdities of his largely light-hearted fare are still the obsessions of primal, and darker nature.

In his latest picture, Irrational Man, Allen chews over the theme of murder, but more so of the self-fulfillment found when acting on our impulses that make us all-too-human. However, as has trended in his recent films, this outing is a one-note exercise that is an unfortunate mix of what can make a Woody Allen film so bad: a boring dud that reveals an obvious perverseness to the whole show.

With Irrational Man, Allen is yet again out to stew on a subject of familiar curiosity–philosophy, and here, of the existential enlightenment and happiness fulfillment that can reawaken even the most cynical of intellectuals, as acted out by a simple measure of following your darkest “id” desires (while it’s not entirely relevant, it wouldn’t take a professional to perform an arguably sound psychoanalysis that tracks along his divisive more media-storied personal life).

Irrational Man stars Joaquin Phoenix as Abe Lucas, a tormented philosophy professor whose arrival to teach at a small east coast university excites everyone–except his spiritually and emotionally bankrupt self. That is, until a random coincidence presents itself (I’ll refrain from explaining further, in what serves as the story’s central plot), to which the broody cynic finds newfound happiness and purpose in acting upon.

If the writing, which feels like a first pass of a script at best, is the clunkiest thing here, then the casting of Phoenix is next in line as to understanding what doesn’t work.

 

The movie opens, after the auteur’s signature black title card opening credits, with our meeting of Abe, but through the campus buzz and chatter of giddy students and faculty alike waxing adorations over his undeniably alluring mystery and dangerous and romantic intelligence. Clearly, we are supposed to like this mysteriously tortured artist character before we even meet him. This, as we learn soon enough, reveals the empty logic that makes up this rather irritatingly unmotivated exercise, and will make Irrational Man another recent Woody whiff.

Much needed cinematic support comes in the form of the new women in Abe’s life, and it mostly takes advantage of those pieces, however eye-rolling they may be. Emma Stone makes her sophomore appearance in an Allen film, after her turn as an alluring young medium in last year’s Magic in the Moonlight, and who once again channels her beam of sunshine radiance into making googly-eyes at another older male love interest. Stone as undergraduate Jill, whose early crush on the intellectual celebrity turns into a rather more consuming attraction, and much to the dismay of undergrad boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley), is always a joy onscreen, and her Jill ultimately becomes the hero of another story altogether.

The sexy basket-case and fellow professor Rita (Parker Posey) serves as the more dominating damsel in Abe’s life, whose equal interest in the newly brought aboard professor illicit casual affairs. With hardly enough good writing here to substantiate the desirability of “Abe Lucas” for these lovelorn women, the whole show feels emptier and more vapid than it possibly even should.

And then there’s the self-tortured artist himself, whose own self-important frustrations serve as the gravitational center to this universe. If the writing, which feels like a first pass of a script at best, is the clunkiest thing here, then the casting of Phoenix is next in line as to understanding what doesn’t work.

Abe, as played by a rather dull Joaquin Phoenix, appears to be a character cut more directly from Allen’s own bank of canonical Woody-types that are his characters, but his lock-jawed delivery and overall burnout moroseness fail to create anything besides a sense of dangerous mystery to the character, and especially not a whiff of a comedic sell which may have saved the film in most ways. The fact that Abe is so un-funnily depressed in the film’s first half, and then so un-funnily not depressed after the inciting incident in the film’s second half, is what may stand as the biggest problem from what makes this movie work.

It may go to reason that, of the writer/director’s entire filmography, of which he makes and releases a film a year, not every one of the seventy-nine year-old neurotic’s projects are going to be hits. And while no parties here will carry these demerits with them (including Allen himself), Irrational Man may serve as the most unexpected entry into lazier storytelling, revealing more perverse discomfort and acknowledgment in a Woody Allen movie than we may be used to.

Irrational Man opens this Friday.