Woody Allen has always been interested in man's search for meaning in life - a search he clearly sees as futile.
Who can forget the young woman in Play It Again, Sam, staring at a Jackson Pollock painting and seeing "the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity"? That's not even the whole quote - but it could be Allen's mantra.
The director has also mined the themes of crime and punishment, including murder - think Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. All these threads - plus, of course, love and seduction - come together in his 45th feature, Irrational Man, which may not be his very best recent work, but is by far not his worst, either.
As in so many Allen films, even if some parts don't jell, others do. If Irrational Man falls short of late-career home runs like Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine, it also feels more fully realized than last year's visually gorgeous but otherwise uneven period piece, Magic in the Moonlight.
As always, the casting is something any director would kill for. Here, we have Joaquin Phoenix (grizzled, slightly potbellied) as an existentially challenged philosophy professor, Emma Stone (utterly effervescent) as his bright-eyed student, and Parker Posey (warmly kooky) as the sex-starved academic who forms the third side of this odd triangle.
The setting is Newport, R.I., and that wind-swept, seaside town looks beautiful - no surprise, given the pedigree of cinematographer Darius Khondji. It's summer session at a small college, and Abe Lucas (Phoenix) arrives to teach philosophy. Accomplished and brilliant, he's also known for having affairs with students and swigging often from a flask in his pocket.
Abe is precisely the sort of disgruntled, unattainable intellectual whom young women can't stay away from. That's what happens to Jill (Stone), who's beautiful, brilliant, kind and also an accomplished pianist.
Meanwhile, Rita (Posey) has been dreaming of bedding Abe since before his arrival, and will not be denied.
What's more, he's exhibiting disturbing nihilistic tendencies. At a party, he gets hold of the family gun and plays a game of real Russian roulette, hoping to teach some sort of metaphysical lesson.
Everything changes, though, when Abe and Jill overhear a conversation in a diner. A beleaguered mother is facing a court case that may cost her custody of her children; the judge is corrupt. If the bad judge were out of the picture, Abe reasons, wouldn't the world be so much better? He begins plotting a solution, and this dark quest fills him with a new zest for life.
The subject may seem too dark for comedy, the treatment (and jazzy score) too light for tragedy. But the director balances it in his own way, and as always, we can take it or leave it.
By Jocelyn Noveck, The Associated Press
