Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.

To Be Or Not: IF I STAY

It’s cliché to say that every problem seems like a life-or-death scenario when you’re young. But the truth is, with burgeoning plans for colleges, careers, and relationships, being a teenager is filled with decisions that can have a lasting impact. Teens feel that pressure. It’s the first time people have a good deal of autonomy over the course their lives will take. No wonder it’s a point in life that leads to such angst, and great movies chronicling it. If I Stay is not a great movie about being a teenager, but it captures some of the subjective experience of having the weight of your future on your hesitant steps into something like adulthood.

It’s a teen weepie that features a high school girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) dealing with her first real boyfriend (Jamie Blackley). She’s a brilliant cellist and wants to go to Julliard. He wants to stay with his skinny-jeans-wearing garage band in Portland and hope to get signed to a record label. Will they break up or try a long distance relationship? It’s a small problem shot in typical glossy teen melodrama style. I’ll admit it’s not very interesting from the outside, but the movie does a good job of communicating the subjective enormity of the question.

What elevates this standard teen romance is a very real injection of life and death. She’s in a car crash. It’s bad. She’s rushed to the hospital, along with her parents (Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard) and little brother (Jakob Davies). She’s in a coma. Prognosis is iffy. We see the previous 18 months of her life, the romance, the college worries, fun times with parents, dates, concerts, practices, school, hanging out with friends, and more. Intercut with those moments are shots of her hooked up to tubes in the ICU, heart monitors beeping while tearful bedside visitors – grandparents (Stacy Keach and Gabrielle Rose), friends (Liana Liberato and Lauren Lee Smith) – wait and worry. All the while, and here’s the movie’s biggest and corniest symbolic flourish, the girl’s spirit walks around the hospital, watching her family, remembering her past, and trying to decide whether she’ll stay or go, whether she’ll wake up or die.

Despite bouncing between her normal teen past and comatose present, all this is presented in a fairly conventional and linear fashion, little time for artsy expressiveness. Imagine what a Terrence Malick or Apichatpong Weerasethakul would do with this material, and then forget it. This is a movie more interested in tenderly evocative prose rather than cinematic poetry. Documentarian R.J. Cutler makes his fiction film debut here and brings to it a good eye, fine pace, and delicate touch. He pulls emotional triggers without seeming to be excessively manipulative about it. Major weepy potential is softly played, sad without belaboring the point. The slick widescreen photography by John de Borman is beautifully blocked in a way that doesn’t call attention to its casual beauty, while the editing finds minor trembles of emotional stream of consciousness in standard plotting that gains power through its juxtapositions.

On its own, the girl’s life would be a minor, but likeable, pokey drama. It’s pleasant to spend time with her great parents. They’re cool, former punk rockers. They’re understanding, judiciously permissive and always ready with smart advice well spoken. There are also some minor pleasures to be found in a teen romance that plucks at some of the right heartstrings. Adapting Gayle Forman’s novel, screenwriter Shauna Cross, who also wrote the wonderful roller derby comedy Whip It, has a good feel for detail. It’s genuine in its approach to quiet fumbling, biting of the lower lip, sudden moves. Worries about separating over a long distance possibility are shortsighted and nicely observed. A first love scene is neatly edited with a series of dissolves, set to an acoustic cover of Beyoncé’s “Halo,” as the girl compares caressing the boy’s body to playing the cello. It’s sweet.

Juxtaposing average teen movie worries with a ghostly bedside vigil brings a mournful weight to it. Sure, these are ordinary teen concerns, not overly original or especially interesting on their own. But through the risk that these last few months might end up being her last, there’s an underlying urgency. When I read in the news about a car accident that leaves an entire family broken apart, dead or dying, it makes me feel sick. The normal details of their lives are suddenly imbued with a melancholy. If someone survives such a crisis, how can one go on living with so much suddenly gone? That If I Stay captures even a glimmer of that response is to its credit. I didn’t need Moretz wandering hospital halls to provide it.

But this is an affecting, heartfelt little drama that slowly overcomes its shaggier artificial impulses to find a strong emotional core, admirably underplaying big moments when it could go histrionic. The climax turns on two small scenes. The first finds Stacy Keach delivering a teary monologue in what is one of the most vulnerable performances of his career. The second is a flashback campfire sing-along jam session to Smashing Pumpkins in which all the characters spend what will be their final happiest moments together. Both are played quietly, all the more effective for it. Commercial concessions, like an overreliance on voiceover that tramples over potentially powerful silences, only smooth over rough edges. It’s a good movie, with fine performances and solid resonances. But imagining longer silences, more artful editing, I could see a great film in there somewhere.