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Reverse Shot's Michael Koresky had a different take. RS also tweeted:

Don't believe the anti-hype. Woody Allen's IRRATIONAL MAN is completely enveloping, beautifully directed and acted.

I really liked this one, and I think others on this site will respond to it as well. For all the well-worn comparisons to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, this struck me as more a comedic take on Cassandra's Dream than the other two.

I caught this almost a week ago now. It's basically Woody Allen in auto-pilot mode, though I can hardly complain about this, because that's almost always still gonna be pretty damn good (and this certainly ranks much higher than his more inert efforts, like Whatever Works or To Rome with Love).

Both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point did this type of story earlier and better, but Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone have great chemistry (Phoenix's role is initially somewhat similar to his alcoholic Freddie Quell or stoned Doc Sportello, but this begins to fade as the story progresses).

Darius Khondji's photography renders the Rhode Island scenery beautiful. The interior of the college, the exterior of its campus, the earthy tones of the seaside... In this respect, it's one of Allen's most visually gorgeous films, and it helps exude a great feeling of a world that every filmgoer will want to live in.

The Narrator Returns wrote:I really liked this one, and I think others on this site will respond to it as well. For all the well-worn comparisons to Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, this struck me as more a comedic take on Cassandra's Dream than the other two.

I totally concur. It's far, FAR better than Cassandra's Dream, too, which I think is one of his absolute lowest points

I find the whole phenomenon of indie films about an older guy who reinvigorates his life through sex with a younger woman kind of uncomfortable, I'll be honest. There seems to be a spate of them, and find it a little icky.

Because such a thing rarely happens in real life, and only recently became a trend in movies

hanshotfirst1138 wrote:I find the whole phenomenon of indie films about an older guy who reinvigorates his life through sex with a younger woman kind of uncomfortable, I'll be honest. There seems to be a spate of them, and find it a little icky.

That's not quite the case for Irrational Man, though.

Just came back from seeing this and found it enjoyable for the most part. It's not a standout, but it's worth seeing for the visuals, direction, performances, and the very strong ending (such a well done and somewhat unexpected scene). The plot seemed to meander a bit, but everything else made up for it.

^^^ All that, plus a refreshing change of pace for Woody to use music that doesn't sound like it came from the 1930's and 1940's. The use of the Ramsey Lewis Trio's music (particularly 'The "In" Crowd' as a sort of recurring theme) goes a long way to give "Irrational Man" a more contemporary vibe than Woody's typical 'stuck in old jazz' soundtrack loop.

Spoiler

Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright struggling over their precipice in Shadow of a Doubt

came to mind during one of the last scenes.

dad1153 wrote:^^^ All that, plus a refreshing change of pace for Woody to use music that doesn't sound like it came from the 1930's and 1940's.

Or the 1910s. One of my major beefs with Match Point was the use of Caruso to the point of perfunctoriness. Contrast that most obviously with Herzog's Fitzcarraldo- not a great film but at least the use of Caruso is pointed and inspired.

It looked like a funnier version of Match Point, but also a less focused one. The internal stuggle of Abe seems overdone often, like he actually likes being depressed up to the point only plotting a murder will make him having fun. Emma Stone's character also seems a bit too much sometimes, and his boyfriend is even worse.

The rest of the movie played as more interesting to me, especially the idea that getting things right might need him doing morally wrong things even by Abe's codes.

All in all though, I found the movie to be a better effort than Magic in the Moonlight, and even Blue Jasmine (which I didn't like).

Regarding the music, though, I grew tired of always listening over and over to the same cue. It sounds as if only 1 song has been licenced for the movie.

Numero Trois wrote:

dad1153 wrote:^^^ All that, plus a refreshing change of pace for Woody to use music that doesn't sound like it came from the 1930's and 1940's.

Or the 1910s. One of my major beefs with Match Point was the use of Caruso to the point of perfunctoriness. Contrast that most obviously with Herzog's Fitzcarraldo- not a great film but at least the use of Caruso is pointed and inspired.

To be fair as I understand it the music budget was just not there hence Glass.

Herzog has limited budgets as well yet he makes the absolute best of his music choices. Exquisitely so. It's a failure of the imagination on Allen's part.

I didn't quite loathe Irrational Man and yet there's something loathsome about it which bothered me throughout. I suppose part of it comes down to the accumulation of so many irritating WA quirks and anachronisms and recurring features: the twenty-somethings who talk like retired art professors, the 40-something woman who refers to cannabis as "grass," the way that the two primary female characters in the film (as in virtually every Allen flick) nonchalantly commit infidelity -- typically it's with the WA-figure within the film, and no exception here with Phoenix who really ultimately is not viewed by the film as a monster so much as a dithering schmuck. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in his review that the film feels more like a rough draft or series of notes than an actual finished work, and I very much concur with that. There's a difference between what critics often refer to as "light" or "fluffy" entertainment, which goes down easy and leaves the mind immediately after viewing, and just plain lazy and incomplete work. This is the latter. Furthermore, the film's use of narration is a new low for Allen -- at least the third-person omniscient prattling of Vicky Cristina Barcelona had a certain interest to its quasi-Barry Lyndon detachment, even if it failed at making any meaningful comment or justifying its existence. But Man's narration, by Stone and Phoenix, is a stultifying, simple-as-that literal communication of the character's feelings, already easily observed onscreen; what the hell is the point of this? When it's not being the worst violator of telling-not-showing it's just ticking the same hoary existential boxes we've already heard ad infinitum in the dialogue; it is completely and thoroughly redundant -- simply, a mistake.

Of course, all this doesn't mean the film is without merit; it's sufficiently diverting and well-acted and achieves the gripping suspense it seeks in its central sequence, and it's certainly beautifully shot in beautiful locations... but it's like a sketch of a drawing of a painting. The central "perfect murder" conceit has already been mined so thoroughly and similarly by WA in the masterful Crimes and Misdemeanors and the elegant/empty Match Point -- what on Earth does the half-assed treatment of it here have to give us? If we compare this film to those, it's most immediately obvious that Man is essentially a comedy, uninterested in any philosophical implications beyond how they impact Abe's character trajectory; on the other hand, the earlier two films were dramas or even tragedies which used their characters more like thematic pawns at the service of the central ideas under examination. In 2015 Allen has no such interest. He simply wants to write what he knows, what he likes and has always liked with an almost pathological obsessiveness, and who cares if it's been written before and better, by himself and others?

This is a disarmingly thin film which actually most reminds of Scoop in the way its ostensibly dramatic or dark nature is neutered by a light, breezy, faux-comedic tone.

Spoiler

(Both films also share a similar non-sequitur disposal of the WA-figure at the ending).

There's just one problem: the movie isn't funny. It's a comedy with no real jokes; a comedy played straight? Odd, and difficult to describe, but it's as if Allen had started off writing the film as a drama but decided halfway through to ax that angle completely. What we end up with is something that's neither here nor there, a lighter-than-air farce with regurgitated dialogue and regurgitated ideas about one of the most serious subjects imaginable, populated with Allen-automatons who seldom convince as anything either human or interesting. With a film this unconscionably lazy, one feels like an overachiever just for getting out of the house to see it.

tenia wrote: Regarding the music, though, I grew tired of always listening over and over to the same cue. It sounds as if only 1 song has been licenced for the movie.

It seemed like he used the same 2 tunes at least 3 times each. And not only that, but the 2 tunes sound very much alike. it's like a director playing the same section of Carmen over and over again throughout a movie and thinking that it's high art.

My problem with the plot (besides the usual - cutesy, not as funny or as deep as he thinks he is) was that this philosophy teacher and author of philosophy books didn't bother to consider

Spoiler

that an innocent person might be accused of the murder.

Joaquin Phoenix usually disappears into his roles. He didn't seem to be able to do that this time. I blame it on Woody's writing.

An under-enthused critical response to a Woody Allen pic doesn't mean anything-- see Magic in the Moonlight's masterpiece status passing almost everyone by (including many in this very thread!)-- but sad to say the mediocre reactions to this film are spot on. To me the biggest issue here is the one oh yeah addressed, in that we have a film made in the style of a comedy but not a comedy. Indeed, this is pretty clearly a straight noir with a philosophy survey course sprinkled liberally enough over everything to pretend there is anything deeper going on than your standard-issue pulp. Had Allen directed the film straight and seriously, it might have been okay. But the jaunty reiterations of that awful "In Crowd" cover are a pretty big flashing signal of the tonal problems within this one, which treads some tired ground, and without much interest. Joaquin Phoenix, left to his own devices, plays inert with too much believability, and as a result is rather dull in the lead, and Emma Stone can only get so much mileage out of having an excellent wardrobe and a decidedly less excellent role to play. Too bad.

Figures that the one very-late-period Woody Allen movie I stand up for with more enthusiasm than "it's pretty good" is the one everyone here is, at most, indifferent to. domino's complaints actually fit my opinion of the film's first part, but we apparently diverge on everything after the diner sequence, from which point I was laughing pretty much constantly.

I always liked this film but on further revisits it's climbed the ladder and now sits amongst my very favorite Allen films. By shifting the interest of egocentric from religion in Magic in the Moonlight to a morality play as told through a lighthearted objective sideways glance, Allen seems to be self-referentially taking the earned predicaments of his more serious films like Cassandra’s Dream (and even aligned-surrogate participation of ethics-rationalizing protagonists in films like Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors), and panning back to reveal how an intellectualized person’s quest for meaning can lead to the most absurd and stupid results, with any ‘meaning’ sourced entirely in his own mind. Phoenix is perfect as the depressed philosophically-obsessive thinker (hilariously a Philosophy professor, why not?) who has inevitably descended into nihilist hedonism, and his only way out is to rationalize his way back to meaning. The misguided essence of these kinds of altruistic actions being anything more than self-gratification is fun to watch and subtly provocative in the road to self-questioning, as Allen makes a character and film designed for overanalyzers like him to look in the mirror and laugh with the self-conscious anxiety that stings from brutal transparency. The skewering of this cognitive-heavy personality is triumphant beyond the jabs because it's acknowledged as dangerous when running riot, not only to oneself but to others, by ignoring one's surroundings in a narrow focused blackout aimed at a hollow mirage.

The film really works though because of Stone, who is a terrific contrast to the solipsistic overthinker, emphasizing his empty and lost self-deception through her personality of pure sensitivity. Of course the gradual movement towards self-preservation doesn’t discriminate against the self-promoted superhumans, and Phoenix’s reduction to a common man proves a facade in character and shell of weakness in self-guided hypocrisy that can't escape Hobbesian motives. Conversely, Stone proves that emotional intelligence reigns by granting the person peripheral vision to humanity’s innate beauty and blossoming shades beyond the ‘self.’ This feels like a film where Allen is taking his cynical intellectual part and cheekily gutting its worth when standing on its own, while finding immense gratitude for his romantic part that makes life actually meaningful and 'feels' without succumbing to cloud those senses permanently with asphyxiating thought.

The concept of existential 'truth' is pretty vacant when unsupported by love in any form external to the self, though that's not to completely deprive the cerebral from allure. Stone's attraction gratifies its value when remaining enigmatic and strikingly honest, but such appeal, like a red-flag lover, is justifiable from a distance in fantasy only, and Allen validates the enticement just as he denounces the 'truth' behind the curtain with watered-down sympathy. The method by which Allen exposes and lets us tire of Phoenix's narcissism is in step with the sobering procedure in decoding his inauthenticity, ironically as the character increasingly believes himself to be more authentic (and further irony can be found in the upbeat twist on a tune as the musical score, playing over incrementally objective lunacy in a subject taking himself seriously; the opening credits are even rolled out scoreless just so we can get the nudging cue directly associated with our first image of Phoenix and his unreliable narration!) The self-reflexive process guides us therapeutically in shedding the glamor side by side with Allen himself, and the structure alone is so smart it's just one of the many elements that deserves more credit than it's publicly received. Stone’s revelation at the end especially is a beautiful impartial reframe on life experience that Allen meditated on a lot this decade, most notably in A Rainy Day in New York. Though here the message seems to be striving for clarity in vision, eventual moderation or balance of insight, but with an admittance that the path getting there is often led by a few encounters with extremes in blind passion or tailspins of scrutiny. This helps reinforce the choice to opt for entertainment and fluid narrative ease, since aside from all the moral philosophy at play, it’s a story that celebrates how the wildest stories are the ones that add to not only the shaping of our values, but the value of our lives.