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Woody's best idea was hiring Phoenix

Jill (Emma Stone) falls under the spell of her depressed philosophy professor Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) in Woody Allen’s latest staring contest with the abyss Irrational Man.
Jill (Emma Stone) falls under the spell of her depressed philosophy professor Abe (Joaquin Phoenix) in Woody Allen’s latest staring contest with the abyss Irrational Man.

I don't enjoy Woody Allen as much as I used to.

Certainly part of this has to do with the unpleasant things we have learned about him in the past 30 years, but I honestly don't think that has much to do with my dissatisfaction with his work. Good work is often accomplished by bad people, or people who harbor and express attitudes we find abhorrent. Ezra Pound's fascism does not revoke his genius; T.S. Eliot's sneering anti-Semitism complicates our feelings about his work but doesn't negate its power. I still love Manhattan, about a 44-year-old man in love with a precocious 17-year-old played by Mariel Hemingway, although it's creepy to read her account of how Allen pursued her in real life.

It's simpler to focus on the art than it is to try to understand the artist. Whatever I think of Allen's character -- and I hardly think of it at all -- is irrelevant when it comes to watching his movies. I don't enjoy them less because I have a better understanding of the kind of person Woody Allen is; I enjoy them less because I've seen so many of them, because I am hardly surprised by the way his characters speak and behave. They have become familiar, and in a way this makes them comfortable to receive, but they don't alarm or excite me.

So I go to his movies more or less dutifully these days, expecting to be mildly disappointed. And I usually am, although there are still witty moments and little flashes of insight that signal Allen is still a probing artist, albeit one afflicted with a strange incuriousness about people much different from himself. I firmly believe he is a snob, and that he has no faith in the ability of people much different from himself to genuinely apprehend what he's doing. But I also think he understands his own limits and regrets his inability to make better movies. I don't think he thinks he's such hot stuff, only that he thinks he's better than most of us.

I like Irrational Man, mostly for the performance of Joaquin Phoenix, who's a genuinely talented natural actor and who probably works at his craft a lot harder than the casual moviegoer might suspect. Phoenix plays a rumpled and depressed philosophy professor named Abe Lucas.

At the beginning of the film, Abe is retreating to the relative safety of leafy Braylin College in Newport, R.I. (the movie makes great use of the city). After the death of his best friend in Afghanistan and his mother's suicide, he finds the world without flavor -- he no longer derives satisfaction from his writing or the humanitarian work he has done all over the globe. While the local academic community regards him as a Byronic figure, Abe is burnt out and alcoholic, going through the motions.

Though he's pursued by faculty floozy Rita Richards (Parker Posey) and his vivacious student Jill (Emma Stone, as the neurotic Allen surrogate who turns up in all his films), he has been rendered useless with women. He flirts with Rita and maintains a platonic relationship with Jill, who finds him attractively complicated, especially in contrast to her hopeless ingenuous boyfriend (Jamie Blackley).

Things change when Abe overhears -- in a creaky, obvious scene -- a woman going on about a corrupt jurist. Abe realizes that he can take action, improve the world by an infinitesimal degree, by killing the man. (Conveniently his target has no family and seemingly no good points -- he doesn't, for instance, make good movies every once in a while.) Deciding to murder him, and to get away with it, allows Abe a new lease on life. He's invigorated. His vitality is restored.

Phoenix is the reason to see this movie -- although Posey and Stone do their best with what they're given, their characters feel more like masculine projections of female irrationality than real characters. (Stone in particular is saddled with some impossible lines to mouth, though she at least consistently looks the part of a college student -- her wardrobe is especially well considered.)

But Phoenix imbues the damaged Abe with textures and nuance Allen could not have imagined. And that accrues to the director's credit: Irrational Man, with another, less compelling lead actor, might have been as boring as it was predictable.

I say predictable because Allen has tackled this sort of existential material before, most notably in 1989's bleak Crimes and Misdemeanors (a hard, unflinching film that avoids the self-conscious cerebralness that permeates some of Allen's work and may be the best of his noncomedies), 2005's Match Point and 2007's Cassandra's Dream. Each of these films revolves around a liberating murder, and since the statute of limitations on spoilage has expired, I'll tell you that Martin Landau in C&M and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Match Point seem to avoid legal consequences for their actions, while in Cassandra's Dream nobody gets out alive.

In a cold, random universe, all outcomes are possible. The bad guy can win every once in a while.

...

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's Dark Places, based on Gillian Flynn's second novel, which was written before Gone Girl, is an overly complicated clockwork of a movie (at times it reminds me of the second season of HBO's True Detective) that showcases a fine cast. While the film's denouement introduces a crippling implausibility, it's a lot of fun to see Charlize Theron as a character as bereft and empty as Phoenix's Abe.

As a young girl, Theron's character Libby survived an attack on her family that killed her mother (Christina Hendricks) and two sisters. She was the crucial witness who put her disaffected teenage brother (played by Tye Sheridan as a teen and Corey Stoll as an adult) in prison for life. Now in her 30s, Libby has lived off her notoriety as a lone survivor for years. Unfortunately for her, there are other little girls whose parents have been murdered in which the public might take an interest.

So when a murder enthusiast -- Nicholas Hoult, who co-starred with Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road -- employs her to reinvestigate the murders, she takes his cash. And, of course, uncovers some surprises.

The film makes good use of its cast -- I particularly enjoyed a turn by Sean Bridgers -- but the cinematography seems to have taken the title as an imperative, and the plot (which owes a little to the Oscar-winning Ray McKinnon-Lisa Blount short The Accountant) gets creaky quickly. Still, it's good excuse to get out of the heat and eat popcorn.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 08/14/2015

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