Aubrey MaloneIrrational Man (15A)
We’re three-quarters of the way into this before the name Raskolnikov is mentioned, but anyone who knows Woody Allen, its writer and director – will be thinking of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s iconic Crime and Punishment character from the moment depressed university lecturer Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) starts to contemplate the ethics – and indeed aesthetics – of murdering somebody for what he perceives as the greater good.
Abe is an existentialist. His thinking flies in the face of rational thinkers like Immanuel Kant, whose “categorical imperative” he quotes to his students only to knock it on the head. Kant lived in a world of reason, Abe argues, and the real world isn’t reasonable.
One day when Abe is in a restaurant with Jill (Emma Stone), a gifted student of his who has a crush on him, they overhear a conversation at the next table. A woman is telling her friends about the fact that she’s being unfairly treated by an unethical judge in a child custody case.
Abe becomes traumatised by her circumstances. So much so that he conceives the idea of murdering the judge. If he does, he thinks, the world will be a slightly better place.
Can the end justify the means? The ramifications of the idea and its intriguing execution – no pun intended – are teased out by Allen in a manner that’s highly implausible. Such an impression is accentuated by a jocular jazz soundtrack running right through the film. This militates against us re-aligning the plotline to the universe of Crime and Punishment, or even Woody’s 1988 film Crimes and Misdemeanours. It reminds us time and again that what we’re watching is a serio-comic Woody Allen drama, rather than a Russian tragedy.
This is unfortunate. If Woody wants to be remembered for being as much Ingmar Bergman as Groucho Marx – he frequently cites these two figures as being endemic influences on him – he would have been better advised to structure the film as a brooding thriller rather than a light-hearted tale of a sexually-frustrated alcoholic trying to get his life back on track by an outrageous act. By doing that the film leaves itself open to the charge of contrivance, the plot playing second fiddle to the Kantian conundrum at its core.
Notwithstanding such concerns this is still a riveting film. It’s made even better by the brilliance of the performances by Phoenix (looking more bulked up than usual) and Stone. Woody has such an identifiable way of expressing himself it’s difficult not to hear his voice squeaking through the lines but Phoenix and Stone are strong enough performers to impose themselves over their dialogue. So also is Parker Posey, who plays an unhappily-married woman Abe has an affair with.
Kant said that if you’re hiding a person in your house and somebody who wishes to kill that person asks you where they are, you have to tell them. Abe disputes this logic, believing that sometimes we have to bend the rules in life. But when he takes the law into his own hands in the murder scenario, the plot thickens. He finds himself in a moral crisis much more complex than he envisaged.
Einstein once said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. Man does, but he doesn’t always roll sevens. “The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley”, as the poet Robert Burns wrote. When Abe’s attempt to create “a slightly better world” goes pear-shaped, he finds himself in a nightmarish predicament where further compromises beckon.
Well done Mr Allen for serving us up another appetising repast. The conclusion of the film might leave you feeling a little bit empty but that’s not to gainsay the beguiling nature of the central conceit.
Very good: ****