Review: "Irrational Man"

I’ve liked a lot of Woody Allen’s stuff over the past decade, as he got out of his comfort zone and did crime dramas, period costume trifles, romantic European adventures -- anything besides self-involved New Yorkers spinning in their own delusions and neuroses. For a guy nearly age 80, I think the last 10 years been his most fertile period since the 1980s.

(Most people consider the ’70s his heyday, but really aside from “Manhattan” and “Annie Hall” his flicks of that era are rather overrated.)

“Irrational Man” is the dry, tasteless chaser at the end of a long and exquisite banquet. This morality-play-cum-murder-mystery is flat and stale, playing out like fourth-string Dostoevsky warmed over with postmodern irony and angst.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe Lucas, a rock star philosophy professor – such persons exist only in the movies – who’s come to a tiny provincial liberal arts college in Rhode Island to teach for the summer. His reputation precedes itself: he’s a boozer, womanizer, moody rebel and suicidal free-thinker. Half the campus is gabbing about him even before Abe anticlimactically pulls up in an aging Volvo, his untucked shirt swaddling a protruding beer gut.

It’s an insular community where everybody knows everyone else’s business. Rita (Parker Posey), a fellow professor whose mid-life crisis seems to ooze from her very pores, has soon wrangled Abe into her bed. But his deepest relationship is with one of his students, a smart and discerning lass named Jill (Emma) whose parents are both music professors at the college.

They strike up a friendship that soon becomes more, at least to Jill, though Abe goes to great lengths to deny it. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Roy (Jamie Blackley), practically vibrates with jealousy toward his older rival, though he labors to make a joke of it.

Abe is searching for a reason to go on living, and he thinks he’s found it by stumbling upon the idea of ending another person’s life. He and Jill overhear the tale of a corrupt judge ruining an innocent woman’s life. Abe becomes obsessed with the idea of pulling off a Hitchcockian murder. The fact that he has no attachment to the victim and no motive for killing him will ensure the perfect crime.

It doesn’t, of course, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie. Things go on, with Abe moralizing his act to himself while Jill plays Nancy Drew, slowly circling a corkscrew of clues that inevitably leads back to the man she (thinks she) loves.

Allen’s storytelling method is to have Abe and Jill pass the narration back and forth between them, so we perfectly understand their thought process and interior monologue. The problem with this approach is that neither character ends up holding any mystery. How much better to make it a game about the impressionable student trying to suss out if the professor she’s sleeping with could be a murderer, or the morally compromised teacher worrying about being bested by his pupil.

In the end “Irrational” is more an exercise than a movie, a bunch of smart, educated people engaged in a grand game of deception – of each other, their moral posturing and, mostly, of themselves.

Video review: "Inside Llewyn Davis"

The biggest question I had about the Coen Brothers’ latest work was not “What?” but “Why?”

Why did they feel compelled to make this movie? Like another fairly recent film of theirs I was cool to, “A Serious Man,” “Inside Llewyn Davis” seems like a movie the co-writer/directors made for themselves rather than for any hypothetical audience. It’s all well and good for artists to primarily please themselves, but that doesn’t mean we need to see it.

Set in New York City in the early 1960s when the folk music scene that produced Bob Dylan was germinating, “Davis” is the story of somebody who never makes it. Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) is a sad sack and a lout who sponges off his friends for everything, even a place to sleep. But he’s a genuinely gifted singer – and so is Isaac, who skillfully and wistfully performs all his songs himself.

Llewyn stumbles from here to there, getting in and out of scrapes, including a perilous pregnancy that threatens the marriage of two fellow singers (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). Occasionally he lands a gig or an audition, but we sense – and so does he – that Llewyn just isn’t destined for the big time.

The story gets interrupted for a long, strange road trip across the country so Llewyn can play for a club manager who apparently doesn’t even know he’s coming. It’s filled with loopy Coen-esque characters, such as John Goodman as a whiny jazzman, but Llewyn doesn’t have much reason for being there.

You can say the same of the movie about him.

Extras are quite scant, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. You only get “Inside ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” a making-of documentary. It does feature the notoriously publicity-averse filmmakers plus all the major cast members. It just would’ve been nice to see some deleted scenes and perhaps a commentary track.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Inside Llewyn Davis"

The Coen brothers are among my favorite filmmakers, but over the last decade or so they’ve run hot and cold … or I have.

“Inside Llewyn Davis” is their latest oh-so-sober effort, a dark and dreary portrait of a wayward folk singer trying to make it in the early 1960s. It’s shot in muted colors, contains little in the way of their trademark ironic humor, and doesn’t appear to be about anything than it superficially is.

It feels more like an exercise than a movie.

The film is wonderfully crafted, as is everything by Joel and Ethan Coen, and the music is often quite tremendous, especially Oscar Isaac in the title role. If you ask me if I wouldn’t mind owning the soundtrack, the answer would be yes.

But when I ask myself the question every filmmaker should before they start a new project -- “What is this movie really about, and why does it need to exist?” -- I’m afraid I come up empty.

The point, if there is one, is that serious artists who refuse to compromise their craft usually end up discarded and forgotten instead of celebrated. It’s only the lucky and the malleable who make it in the music biz. This comes as startling news, I’m sure, to exactly no one.

Llewyn is literally a man without a home, trundling his guitar case and duffle bag from apartment to apartment in New York City, where he crashes on the couches of his friends. The word “friend” is relative in Llewyn’s case, since a relationship with this man only flows in one direction. Food, accommodations, emotional support, invitations for gigs and a meager paycheck -- Llewyn only takes, not gives.

The one place where pours out his soul is behind a microphone. Isaac has a terrific voice and musicianship, and I loved the fact that the Coens actually let the actors perform the songs from start to finish, instead of that montage-and-segue thing you usually get.

He’s facing a new crisis when Jean (Carey Mulligan), a friend and one-half of the husband-and-wife singing team of Jean & Jim, announces that she’s pregnant, possibly with Llewyn’s baby. He has to come up with the money for the abortion, in addition to concealing this fact from Jim (Justin Timberlake).

The rest of the story wanders as Llewyn does. He ends up on other couches in other apartments, encountering other would-be folk singers and their enablers. Among those he meets is Troy Nelson (Stark Sands), an Army soldier who sings during his furloughs. Everyone adores him, and he certainly has talent, but Llewyn aptly wonders if Troy possesses higher brain function.

During one long, strange trek to Chicago to meet a producer, Llewyn finds himself ensconced inside a car sharing a ride with Roland Turner, a crippled jazzman played by John Goodman, who needles Llewyn that those in his profession “play all the notes” instead of just three or four chords. His largely mute driver, Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund), seems like he wandered in from the “On the Road” film adaptation.

There’s one terrific, heartbreaking scene where Llewyn finally gets to audition for that producer (F. Murray Abraham). The man clearly recognizes there’s a bonafide artiste sitting in front of him, but crass concerns prevail: “I don’t hear any money there,” he says, less a judgment than an apology.

Here’s a good Rorschach test to see if you’ll be drawn to “Inside Llewyn Davis”: What did you think of the Coens’ “A Serious Man”? If you were put off by that impenetrable rumination, which to me played like an inner dialogue inside the directors’ heads, then this new film will feel like more of the same. If you loved “A Serious Man,” you’ll probably enjoy this one, and we can find something else to talk about.