IRRATIONAL MAN Is An Entertainingly Oddball Effort From Woody Allen

IRRATIONAL MAN Review:

- At this point, watching a new Woody Allen film is sort of a singular experience. For good and for bad, there's nothing else quite like it. Between Woody's real-life scandals and the way they seem to awkwardly and consistently be reflected in his films (older men with younger women, for example) and his anachronistic dialogue and characters, there are often a lot of things in Woody's modern-day movies that make me cringe just a little. And yet ... I still love visiting the world of Woody. No other filmmaker has a voice like his, and few other movies fixate on the philosophical in quite the same way as Allen's tend to do. Such is IRRATIONAL MAN - a movie that is both frustrating and uniquely entertaining. It's got a fantastic cast - anchored by Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone (and Parker Posey!) - and a fun premise. It's good enough that I was able to overlook some of the awkwardness and go with it. Even though the movie's got no Allen and not even an Allen proxy, in many ways it's vintage Woody.

IRRATIONAL MAN follows Phoenix as Abe, a sort of rock star philosophy professor who seems to go from university to university, wowing students, pissing off faculty, drinking too much, and wooing his fair share of female students and colleagues along the way. He seems to be trying - but not necessarily succeeding - to avoid his old patterns at his latest teaching gig at a Brown-esque New England college. A married music teacher (Posey) lusts after him, as does Jill (Stone), a student who worships the ground he walks on. Even as Abe succumbs to both of their wiles, he finds himself restless and anxious. What finally motivates and excites him is a random idea that comes into his head, after overhearing a conversation at a diner. Abe hears a woman break down in tears, complaining about a heartless judge. Abe becomes convinced that if the cruel judge were to die - if he were to be murdered - the world would ultimately become a better place, and many would be spared his cruelty. Abe decides that he should be the one to commit the act, and begins brainstorming the perfect murder - all, he's convinced, in the name of serving the greater good. The more sure Abe becomes about the rightness of his mission, the more he seems to climb out of his alcohol-fueled depression.

On one hand, IRRATIONAL MAN is a very small, very slight film. On the other hand, there's a lot to unpack here. Allen seems to be using Abe to explore the idea of going down a philosophical rabbit hole at the expense of one's own morality. By becoming obsessed with "the greater good," Abe loses sight of just how coldly cruel his actions really are. And ultimately, he's something of a hypocrite - because as much as he talks about the greater good, he'll also do almost anything in the name of self-preservation. Basically, IRRATIONAL MAN seems to be Allen's thesis-statement about why putting too much stock in high-minded philosophical ideas is, essentially, bull$#&%. 

Phoenix's mumbly-weirdo persona is a good fit for the film. It's easy to buy him as a wrapped-up-in-his-own-head philosophy professor with a bit of a screw loose. He also brings a lot of humor to the table. What's more though, he is able to run with Allen's sometimes-stilted dialogue and make it his own. Emma Stone has the tougher time of things. As Jill, Stone is forced to play a doting college student who feels like a relic of some lost 70's TV-movie about New England prep-school girls with a rebellious streak. Before she falls in with Abe, Jill is dating a guy so dorky and square that he may as well be wearing a white sweater draped around his neck (he may actually be in some scenes, I don't recall). And Jill talks like no 21-year-old has *ever* talked, except in Woody-World. But that's part and parcel, I guess, with these movies. At least Parker Posey is better able to just go all-in and throw herself into the role of attention-starved hanger-on. Posey is great here, and by going broad with the character she makes it work.

The New England setting is an unusual one for Allen, but he really takes advantage of it. It's a great-looking film, capturing the stately vibe of an Ivy League university and of a quaint, seaside New England college town. There's nothing really flashy here, but the movie overall is picturesque and perfectly captures the sort of world of academia that surrounds Abe and, in many ways, feeds his vices. 

If you can get past all the weird Woody-isms, there's a fun little psychological comedic thriller to be found here. Yes, there will be more philosophers name-dropped than you'll know what to do with. And yes, you can have a pretty good drinking game if you take a shot every time a character awkwardly and non-ironically uses the term "making love." But you've also got to sort of marvel at how Allen's scripts, as dusty and eccentric as they may feel in 2015, remain stubbornly intellectual in an age where most everything else in pop-culture feels dumbed-down to the nth degree. Sure, we've seen many a movie in which a seemingly mild-mannered man tries his hand at murder. But rare is the movie where that man's thoughts on the matter are presented in the context of long, flowing dialogue exchanges about philosophy and existentialism and nihilism and ... well, you get the picture. That's Woody for you. I'm always curious what stories he has for us, and always interested to hear what he has to say. IRRATIONAL MAN is a strange beast of a film - stubbornly eccentric and occasionally frustrating - but it's also oddly refreshing: a complete 180 from most of what you'll see in theaters this year. 

My Grade: B

BLUE JASMINE Is Woody Allen at The Top of His Game

BLUE JASMINE Review:

- I've enjoyed Woody Allen's spate of recent films, but man, Blue Jasmine reminds us why Allen isn't just some eccentric uncle who makes amusingly nostalgic romps, but a still-vital filmmaker with real bite. Personally, I think Blue Jasmine is Allen's best film in years. It's very funny at times, but also has some real profundity, some real darkness, and some real, well ... "realness." Look, Woody Allen is a creative voice who's always had and always will have his eccentricities. But Blue Jasmine is his first film in ages that feels like it takes place not just in Woody's world, but in the here and now. It's saying something about the moment we live in - giving it a vitality that I think eluded even Woody's more well-received recent movies, like Midnight In Paris. At the same time, the movie is absolutely stacked with fantastic performances, including a leading-actress turn from Cate Blanchett that's likely the best of the year so far. This one caught me off-guard - it's not just one of the best Woody Allen films of the last decade, or two - but one heck of a movie in general.

BLUE JASMINE centers around Blanchett's Jasmine, a woman who, for a long time, lived a very calculated life of upper-crust privilege. I say calculated because Jasmine very deliberately went about molding herself into this high society woman - marrying a wealthy investor Hal (Alec Baldwin), firmly entrenching herself among the New York elites, and crafting an image of herself - from her clothes, to her way of speaking, to her name (Jasmine isn't the name she was born with) - that exudes upper class 1 percent-ism. The catch is that maintaining her perch atop high society meant being willfully ignorant of what was going on right in front of her eyes. Hal pampered and spoiled Jasmine, but he was also up to plenty of no-good. He was raking in money via a Ponzi-like scheme, scamming people into investments that didn't add up. Meanwhile, he was sleeping with seemingly every woman in sight, from his fitness instructor to Jasmine's friends. And Jasmine, terrified of losing it all, turns a blind eye. That is, until things reach a breaking point. Ultimately, Hal is exposed as a fraud and a cheat, goes to jail, and Jasmine loses everything. All of a sudden, her modern-day Blanche Dubois is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Well, not strangers, exactly. While Jasmine was climbing the ladder of class and wealth in New York, her sister (not by blood - both were adopted), Ginger (Sally Hawkins), was busy living a humble blue-collar life. At first, she was married to the slovenly Augie (Andrew Dice Clay). But after his investment in Hal's Ponzi scheme went south, Augie parted ways with Ginger. Now, she's with Chili (Bobby Canavale), a slightly volatile grease-monkey cut from a similar cloth. The two live in San Francisco, where Ginger lives in a humble apartment with her two sons. And that's where Jasmine, penniless and aimless (though still sporting designer clothes and luggage) ends up - with nowhere else to go, and no one else to turn to except the sister who she long neglected.

When I called the film biting, I did so because it's both a takedown of upper-class privilege, but also a cautionary tale about settling for less when one probably deserves better. Basically, Allen sort of brilliantly looks at both upper and lower class lifestyles, and bravely points out that, in reality, neither is quite so great or admirable if built on a foundation of malaise and self-denial. Jasmine is, for a while, totally lost once she has to fend for herself and carve her own path. Ginger, meanwhile, staunchly defends her less glamorous, more carefree lifestyle - even as she falls in with men who are, in many ways, losers. Jasmine's taste in men isn't much better. She stayed with Hal for years despite his moral bankruptcy, and later, she latches on to Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard), a snobbish upper-cruster who sees Jasmine less as a fully-formed woman, and more as a would-be-wife who will help further his political aspirations.

None of this is black-and-white or cut-and-dried. As Jasmine and Ginger circle each other and analyze each other's lives, both have moments where they seem to speak truth, and both have moments where they seem hopelessly and even comically misguided. Even Jasmine's somewhat-valid criticisms of her sister are often undermined by Jasmine's instability - she's suffering a prolonged nervous breakdown, and has frequent moments of pill-popping hyper-anxiety. She talks to herself, carrying out extended conversations with no one in particular. She makes plans that don't quite make sense. And she is a habitual liar, unable to admit to others or to herself the truth about her life or who she was and is.

All of this is brought to life in a stunning performance from Cate Blanchett, who is just a whirlwind of raw emotion, just-barely-holding-it-together anxiety, and desperate determination to somehow course-correct and make things right. Blanchett's performance is amazing in that it veers effortlessly between comedy and tragedy. She picks her spots of when to let Jasmine's over-the-top obliviousness get played for laughs, and when to mine her mental anguish for genuine pathos. This is a big, over-the-top performance, but it's also riddled with nuance - little moments that make this just an incredibly fully-formed character, wholly inhabited by Blanchett. It's one of the singular performances in an already iconic career.

Sally Hawkins is also quite good, bringing city-girl spunk to Ginger and making her incredibly likable, if not tragically naive. But man, BLUE JASMINE is just filled with terrific supporting turns. One of the standouts has got to be Andrew Dice Clay as Auggie. I haven't seen Clay in many acting roles previously, but the guy pours his heart into this one. The notorious comedian seems to channel his real-life frustrations and world-weariness right into Augie, creating an incredibly authentic-feeling character. The trick that Clay pulls is that when we first meet Augie, he's a funny but off-putting schlub - a gruff, thickly-accented New Yawker who seems like bad news. But somehow, rough-and-tumble Clay becomes, in a strange way, the movie's moral conscious. He's the one guy in the movie who is content to just work hard and do what he can to make something of himself, without any shortcuts. It's telling that Augie and Ginger's ill-fated investment with Hal came about because they won some money in the lottery. One of the biggest morals of Blue Jasmine is to not trust that which comes without having been truly earned.

Louis CK also pops up in a really interesting supporting role, as a seemingly well-meaning nice-guy who tries to court Ginger. CK plays the part to perfection, and there are some great moments between him and Sally Hawkins. There's also a great role in the movie for one of my favorite actors, Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays a dentist who offers Jasmine a job as his receptionist. I won't spoil how their professional relationship plays out, but I will say that Stuhlbarg again shows his knack for awkward humor with this part. Meanwhile, Stuhlbarg's Boardwalk Empire cast-mate Bobby Cannavale (who was awesome on the show this past season), is also quite good here as another unstable alpha-male type. He's oddly still sporting his 1920's-style haircut from Boardwalk in the film, but I guess it sort of fits Chili's role as a sort of throwback man's-man type who likes beer, boxing, and hitting the town with his group of comically thuggish friends. Alec Baldwin is also excellent as Hal - he does sort of a less-comic version of 30 Rock's uber-confident Jack Donaghy - he plays Hal as a guy who seems to have it all figured out, but with hints that the cracks in his master plan are starting to show. My one question mark was honestly with Peter Sarsgaard. It might just be me, but I found his character to be almost cartoonishly snooty and annoying, even though the movie treats him pretty seriously, and Sarsgaard never really seems to act in a way that's at all comic or self-aware. He just felt to me less like a character I should be taking seriously, and more like a guy who should have been the villain in an 80's John Hughes teen movie, were he a few decades younger. I think there's a weird discrepancy here, where Sarsgaard has a John Malkovich-like over-the-topness about him - which makes him great for playing super-villains and whatnot, but less suited for more straightforward characters.

Sarsgaard's character is, luckily, one of the few traces in Blue Jasmine of the sort of weird Woody-isms that tend to pop up in Allen's latter-day films. Perhaps it's a symptom of getting older, but Allen's more recent films take place in modern times, but have a lot of weird anachronisms. It's like Allen flirts with trying to make things current, but then just says "to hell with it." And so we get Sarsgaard's straight-from-the-80's character, or a key plot point about how Jasmine needs to enroll in a computer class, just so she can enroll in an online course. Even though these are minor points in the grand scheme of things, I find it frustrating when everything else feels so timely and relevant, and clicks so well, and then these weird quirks come along and take you out of the movie a bit.

Semi-intrusive Woody-isms aside, BLUE JASMINE really is sort of a remarkable film in the Allen cannon. It's his 48th (!) film, but markedly different from anything he's done before - weaving expertly between comedy and drama, functioning as both smartly-observed social satire and heartrending character study. Woody tells this story with style and texture. He smartly uses flashbacks to show us key chapters from Jasmine's old life with Hal, and uses said flashbacks to emphasize her fractured state of mind in the present. Cate Blanchett, for her part, knocks it out of the park. And the movie is filled with applause-worthy performances, both from expected, always-reliable actors (Stuhlbarg, Louis CK, Baldwin), and unexpected surprises (Dice Clay). There's a fire here, an underbelly of emotion and intensity, that's totally gripping. At the same time, there are funny moments that show us the absurdity of these characters and the lives they've crafted for themselves. Sometimes, a new Woody Allen film comes out, and it serves as a nice reminder that the guy's still kicking, but not much more. This time, it's much more than that. This is a reminder that Woody was, and still, sometimes, is, one of the best filmmakers working today.

My Grade: A-

TO ROME WITH LOVE: Woody Allen's Euro-Odyssey Continues

TO ROME WITH LOVE Review:

- Even if I don't love all of his work, I'll always be interested to see a new Woody Allen film. Woody's movies are so distinctly ... Woody ... that it's fun to just get inside the guy's head for a little bit and see what's on his mind these days. His movies, to me, are always fascinating to watch even when they don't 100% click - because there, on-screen, you're seeing the gears of his brain turning, seeing him work out his ever-expanding neuroses for all to see. Now, I tend to think that the chasm between the "great" Woody Allen films and the "dud" Woody Allen films is not necessarilly that great. It's why I tend to be surprised when, by turns, critics and fans hail something like Midnight in Paris as a crowning achievement, while writing off something like Anything Else as a bomb. Most of Woody's films have their moments. Most have some pointed observations, some interesting philisophical themes. But most also have implausibilities, anachronisms, awkwardness - characters that seem to exist only in a weird Woodyland where people on the street stop and discuss poetry and philosophy in casual conversation. Especially as Woody's gotten older, there's increasingly a huge disconnect between his percieved worldview and how things actually are. He usually writes characters and stories that are supposed to be grounded in reality (unlike, say, a Wes Anderson who is clearly writing from a left-of-center perspective). But again, Woody's reality sometimes feels like that of a guy who needs to get out more and live in the actual real world. And yet ... like I said, there's something to be said for a guy who is this singular of a voice. Sometimes, it's nice to imagine living in Woody's world, where nerds win the hearts of brilliant beauties, where knowledge of literature and the arts is used as romantic currency, where everyone is is smart, worldly, and well-off enough to spend their time dealing with the existential rather than the real.

Which brings me to TO ROME WITH LOVE. In many ways, I enjoyed it about as much as Midnight In Paris. For one thing, the setting is spectacular - if nothing else, the film serves as a great little travelogue. Allen still has a great eye for location, and he has an uncanny ability to film a given city and make it look both authentic and exotic and otherworldly. Allen's also got a talent for capturing the personalities of his cast members, and the cast of this film is truly top-notch. Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Ellen Page, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Alison Pill, Judy Davis, and Fabio Armiliato (a real-life opera singer who's hilarious playing one here) - all are great in the film. Even Woody himself gets in on the action, playing Alison Pill's father in a very amusing role - his first on-camera part in several years.

The film's story is actually four stories. Four interweaving but wholly separate stories that each tell a comedic tale set in Rome. In one story, Eisenberg plays an architecture student studying in Rome and living with his girlfriend, played by Gerwig. Her friend - a lovable but clearly crazy aspiring actress (Page) comes to visit for a few weeks, and immediately, Eisenberg is tempted by her freewheeling ways. The twist/joke here is that, one day, Eisenberg runs into an older, well-known architect played by Baldwin. the two strike up a conversation and become friendly, and Baldwin begins following his young apprentice around, giving him advice and providing a running commentary on the younger man's romantic dillemnas. Is Baldwin actually an older version of Eisenberg, magically transported back to the past to lend a hand to his younger self at a moment when he's about to - potentially - make a life-changing mistake? The movie plays coy, but it's the kind of magical-realism-infused device that Woody loves. In the second story, an ordinary man in Rome (Benigni) wakes up one day to find - suddenly and inexplicably - that he is the most famous man in Rome. He's a star, a tabloid sensation, a celebrity. But why? This, also, is Woody having fun with magical-realism. In the third bit, a young couple travels to Rome together - while happy on the surface, each longs for something a bit more adventurous from life. When they separate for the day, each finds temptation - the guy from a gorgeous prostitute (Cruz) who mistakes him for her client, the gal from a famous actor who takes a liking to her. In the final story, Woody and his wife (Davis) travel to Rome to visit their daighter and her new fiance. When they meet the fiance's family, Woody has a "eureka!" moment when he hears his in-law-to-be singing in the shower (Armiliato). It so happens that Woody's character is a retired opera director, and he sees this man - who's never sang professionally - as his ticket back to the bigtime. Only problem is, the dude can only sing well while in the shower. And so, yeah, shenanigans ensue from there.

All four stories are pretty amusing, though the one that worked for me the most was probably the Benigni segment, as it was a rare instance where Woody seems to strike at some spot-on social satire, with regards to our current Reality TV/TMZ culture. Benigni plays the whole thing brilliantly, and is very funny. This is also the segment of the movie where Woody's script is just in full-on farce mode, and it works well. It's nice to see him do something so blatantly silly and comedic. Of course, the opera-singer story is also very funny at times, but it's also much more dragged-out feeling as it's sort of a one-note joke. That said, I'll say again that Armiliato is hilarious, and also, Allen gets in a few choice quips - some vintage Woody sprinkled in there. The young couple storyline is okay, but meanders and feels a bit miscast. The actor who seduces the young woman is supposed to be a suave George Clooney type, but doesn't really pull it off. Cruz is good though, and looks stunning. The Eisenberg/Gerwig/Page/Baldwin storyline is the one with the most potential, but also the one that felt the most off to me. You've got two of the most perfect possible Woody surrogates in Eisenberg and Page, but the dialogue they're given feels like Woody at his worst - pretentious and stilted. I mean come on Woody, stop having your characters use the term "make love" in every other sentance. And why is Jesse Eisenberg dressed like an 80-year-old man? I know, some of these things are surface details, but still ... there's just a lot that felt *off* about this segment in particular. It's a feeling you get a lot when seeing Woody trying to do slice-of-life stuff these days. Maybe the segment could have worked better if it was the subject of an entire film - certainly, there's enough potential here to make a whole movie around this group of characters. But the anthology aspect of the movie - while helping the simpler, sillier segments of the movie - harms this more serious, more thematically ambitious portion.

If there's one overarching theme of the movie, I suppose it'd be that of people not being content with what they have, then coming to realize that, perhaps, things aren't quite as bad as they'd seemed. "It could always be worse." But that theme only very loosely ties things together. And the Rome setting gives the film visual continuity, but not necessarilly narrative continuity. The upside is that To Rome With Love is easy and breezy - it's pretty much enjoyable from start to finish, even if you end up wincing at some of the dialogue and characterization choices. Some critics may look for the broader critical analysis in all this ... is this "good Woody" or "bad Woody?" Is this the end of Woody's recent "streak," or a sign that his European film tour is losing steam? Is this a letdown after Midnight in Paris, or a solid companion piece. The answer is all and none. This is a "lite" movie from Allen, sure, but it's also a quintisenntially Woody Allen movie, with a lot of the strengths and flaws that you so often find in his work. But the man is now a novelty, because there are so few singular voices making movies. Especially in the summertime, when so many movies are processed, synthetic, product - it's fun and refreshing to see what now amounts to the cinematic equivalent of your neurotic comedian uncle sitting you down and telling you a couple of funny stories.

My Grade: B