Respond to these rapid questions in our Irrational Man quiz and we will tell you which Irrational Man character you are. Play it now.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe, a philosophy professor who develops an obsession with killing a judge in “Irrational Man,” which appears to be Woody Allen’s 328th film. Emma Stone plays the mesmerized student he falls for. It is not only a lousy movie. It is a compilation of notes for a movie that was never completely finished, much less reached the rough draft stage. Because of this, it is more depressing than other well-known Woody Allen flops like “Celebrity,” “Curse of the Jade Scorpion,” and “Scoop,” where at least you could kind of see what the director was going for and sense the movie lurching in a certain direction despite the fact that it kept tripping over its shoelaces and colliding with things.
The screenplay, or what passes for a script, is the main issue. Allen directed “Irrational Man” with his signature grace and economy (he’s been a better director than writer for about twenty years), and it was performed with acting that could be characterized as heroic resourcefulness. Phoenix and his co-stars strive to make their characters seem believable as human beings in each scene, and occasionally they succeed. Other redeeming qualities include The Ramsey Lewis Trio’s sprightly needle-drop music and Daris Khondji’s beautiful panoramic vistas of Rhode Island, which give the discussion of hopelessness, drinking, and murder a Kubrickian chill.
Every admirable effort by the cast and crew, however, is undone by Allen’s disorganized, tediously declamatory screenplay, which frequently sounds like a bad imitation of Allen’s dialogue by someone who has watched his films with a superficial ear and come away thinking that the key to sounding smart is dropping great thinkers’ names and oversimplifying their ideas. There is narration for both characters as well. When the voice-over is describing activities just before or after they are performed by the characters, as though providing its own narration track for the blind, it makes observations that don’t need to be prompted (“A lot was really wrong with Abe”).
The main source of tone-deaf claims in the movie are made by Abe, who also says things like “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” “Doestoevsky understood it,” and “Kant would agree that in a truly just world, there’s no room for lying” (a Kierkegaard crib). Abe leads up to declarations with sentences like, “You know, Simone de Beauvoir once hypothesized, rather properly,” oblivious to how pretentious he sounds.
But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this Irrational Man quiz.
Abe’s speech pattern would make dramatic sense if he were to be a college-educated moron like Diane Keaton’s character in “Manhattan,” even though you secretly wanted to knock out his other contact lens, to quote Lily Allen’s character in the later movie. However, Abe is reputed to be a well-known philosophy professor who has fallen on hard feet due to depression, a drinking problem, and his inability to keep Abe, Jr., in his pants. Abe’s supposed to be so impressive that coworkers and superiors will approach him at parties and compliment him on his situational ethics essay despite his painfully obvious and socially unacceptable alcoholism (he blithely swigs from a flask in public like a high school student trying to seem reckless and dark). (In my dreams, the movie turns to Woody Allen receiving a trophy for writing the clumsiest expository sentence ever; Abe responds, “Thank you, It generated a little debate with the philosophy department at Adair.)
Instead of spitting up these phrases like hairballs, Phoenix tries to deliver them. More often than you may imagine, he is successful. Stone works nearly as many miracles as his adoring pupil Jill. The harder role is, in some ways, Stone’s. It doesn’t take much convincing to convince us that Jill, a smart and responsible young woman with a handsome, sensitive young boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), would find this shambling, unshaven, forty-something quote-machine irresistible, unlike Abe, who we instantly believe would be attracted to because of his youth, beauty, and relative innocence. Abe wears a t-shirt that hugs his fat tummy so tightly that it makes him appear pregnant. Abe is almost as annoying as Max von Sydow’s painter in “Hannah and Her Sisters” yet nowhere near as funny.
Irrational Man Quiz
How intelligent and self-aware should these characters be? Is Allen trying to make a point about the moral and emotional depravity of educated people? How ironic is Abe’s terrible past, which includes a mother who killed herself by taking bleach, a best friend who was killed walking on a mine in Iraq, and several failed missions to spread good by going to disaster hotspots throughout the world? Dramatic and humorous parts of the script are so underdeveloped in this section that they wouldn’t even qualify as half-baked after a week in a kiln. Abe and Jill and their world hardly get any attention from Allen, much less the potentially interesting side characters like Rita (Parker Posey), a colleague who escapes the drudgery of her sad marriage by seducing the new guy with promises of “fantastic grass” (she time-warped in from 1978, apparently).
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Irrational Man quiz.
The lack of refinement and structure in the script has an unsettling air of arrogance. The film appears to believe that just by having its characters on screen, saying and doing things, we will feel strongly about them. This attitude is only bothersome until the movie’s almost midpoint, when “Irrational Man” transforms from Allen’s countless older man-younger woman romance—already problematic given that Abe repeatedly rejects Jill until he can no longer—into a murder plot. While eating lunch outside, Abe and Jill overhear a woman sobbingly telling her friends about a corrupt family court judge in the booth next to them. Naturally, allegations that Allen raped Dylan Farrow, the little daughter of his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow, have dogged him. At various points along the process, Allen has claimed that the judge in his own custody determinations was stupid and morally dubious. Because doing so would do more for justice than Abe could as a writer and because he and Jill have no personal connection to the case, Abe gets obsessed with killing the family court judge. By doing so, he would rid the world of a terrible, useless man and end his reign of injustice.
The end outcome resembles Allen’s fantasized murder of the judge who separated him from the girl he was accused of abusing. The fantasy about Allen’s relationship with his wife Soon-Yi, Farrow’s child by conductor Andre Previn, feels more comfortable and self-justifying when it is tucked inside of this. It is not necessary to have an opinion on Woody Allen’s personal life or his alleged crimes in order to find this scenario repugnant. Not only does it appear to be directly autobiographical at first glance, but Allen also keeps it at a distance and wraps it up in beautiful imagery, upbeat music, and plausible denial, as he often does.
About the quiz
Everything is conceptualized in morbidly humorous ways, giving the impression that we are watching a rehash of themes and circumstances that Allen addressed more creatively in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point,” his two most overtly Dostoevsky-inspired films. However, in this instance, Allen doesn’t seem to be investigating and highlighting his propensity for ruthlessness or our snide imaginings of same, but rather just rubbing everyone’s face in the scandal, even as he strangely, simultaneously denies to us that he is doing any such thing.
Also, you must try to play this Irrational Man quiz.
It seems like Allen wants to give his critics a rope to hang him with. He is free to do that. But if he had provided them with a good film to watch while they braided the noose, that would have been lovely.
For more personality quizzes check this: Prem Ratan Dhan Payo Quiz.
