IRRATIONAL MAN: Woody Allen and the Meaning of Light.

     Irrational Man, Woody Allen's forty-fifth film, is not as serious as I thought, as bad as I feared or as good as I hoped. It's about a bored intellectual (Joaquin Phoenix), who discovers the meaning of life by committing the perfect crime. He's so thrilled, in fact,that he confesses what he did to his girlfriend (Emma Stone), only to realize that now, she knows too much. A small, but clever idea that deserves a smaller or, at least, shorter movie.

     Had Rod Serling used that idea for a thirty-minute episode of The Twilight Zone, people would still be talking about it - especially if it had a twist ending. That's because Mr. Serling respected irony - and had a light touch. Not light "optimistic" or light "comedic," but light as opposed to heavy, subtle instead of blunt. I'm not suggesting that Irrational Man is an existential film noir about a cold-blooded killer like Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967). It isn't, but only because most of Irrational Man is not about philosophy or murder. The college setting and most of the characters serve as a beard for the relationship (I don't want to say romance) of a mature man and a college-age woman. There's a lot of talk about Existentialism, but it consists mostly of name-dropping as if a college class in philosophy was a cocktail party for the drug generation. There's also (without being a spoiler)a crime, but not the kind committed by brilliant, but bored, intellectuals in real life like those of Leopold and Loeb or The New Yorker. It all seems to exist for the sole purpose of having the Joaquin Phoenix character say, "I'm enjoying life instead of celebrating death." Not exactly a light touch (see above).

     The acting - as you'd expect from a Woody Allen movie - is uniformly good (Parker Posey could bring it down a touch) and manages to rise above the uncertain tone and dubious content. The music, though, (also a strength in Allen movies) is limited to the fifty-year-old  jazz classic, "The In Crowd," by The Ramsey  Lewis Trio. It's a lively tune and keeps things moving, but has no other relation to the movie. If there's no "in crowd" and it doesn't help establish time and place, why is it the only song? Could it be one of Allen's favorites? After all, the music you love when you're young is the music you love forever.

     I hope Woody Allen makes another forty-five movies. In that spirit, I wish that he would trust his stories more, employ his light touch - Midnight In Paris (2011) - more often and have his obsessions serve his films - instead of the other way around.

MAD MEN ON THE SUBWAY.

      I just saw a great ad on the subway. It's so good that Mad Men's Don Draper could have written it. The ad shows two pictures of the same attractive, young woman in a T-shirt. In one, she's frowning while holding a pair of tomatoes in front of her chest. In the other, she's smiling while holding grapefruits. It's  an ad for plastic surgeons! GET IT?

     How does such a simple ad achieve such immense power? By drawing on three sure-fire sources of humor: poor self-image, elective surgery and comparing women to food. Then using the humor to zero in relentlessly on it's target market: women who choose surgeons for their personalities. It's a small market, but only because surgeons - unlike game show hosts - don't cultivate their personalities. They tend to be pragmatic, "See the hill, take the hill" types and polishing their wit and humor usually takes a back seat to being able to tie a knot inside a nut shell.

     The success of even the best ads, though, depends to a large extent on the proper advertising medium. This is where I part company  with our scalpel-wielding friends. I'm not sure subways are the best place to advertise plastic surgery. (Don't think for a second that I'm a snob about subway advertising. I am constantly asking myself, "Is it too late to learn English, become a TV repairman and is my baby getting the proper nutrition." For the record, I speak English -
don't write it too well - am baffled by remote controls and don't have children.) Getting back to the subway, the advertiser in question is depending on a commuter to look up from her paper and think, "Hmm. Maybe I need plastic surgery?" Whereas the opposite happens ALL THE TIME. "That person needs it, that person needs it and that person really needs plastic surgery. In fact, everyone on this subway car needs it except me."

     There's also the issue of price. The price of most surgery - even with insurance - is out of the range of most subway riders. Our clever carvers, though, know how to bypass sales resistance. They publish the price. By offering a breast enhancement for $3900, they lock up the business of every woman who's ever thought, "I'd pay a lot for a boob job, but four grand is my squealing point." It's not a perfect strategy, however.They may also be alienating the women who think, "For four thousand bucks, I want more than grapefruits. I want melons!"

     Answering that concern is the role of advertising copy. One could, for instance, say that this surgical practice can meet the demand for any kind of fruit. A perky pair of cantaloupes? Done! Unfortunately,there's very little room for copy on subway ads - even with small type.  So, our advertiser  is limited to saying - in very large type - that they perform a BRAZILIAN BUTTUCK LIFT. I have no idea what this procedure involves, but, harking back to Mad Men days, it sounds like a cold war maneuver in which the U.S. parachutes buttocks into Brazil to keep the country from turning communist. Calling it a "butt lift" would be more clear, but might be in bad taste.

SHOWS FOR DAYS: A Midsummer Night's Drone.

Memory play and coming of age story about the making of a writer as well as an affectionate look at community theater: Douglas Carter Beane's Shows For Days embraces all these genres - and, somehow, they all slip through his fingers.

Shows For Days, at the Vivian Beaumont, recalls the playwright's introduction to the stage at a community theater in Reading, PA when he was fourteen. Not coincidentally, it also concerns his first experience with either love or lust, we're not sure. Memory plays are irresistible to writers because it allows them to depict their young selves as either heroes, victims or some touching amalgam of both. Depicting themselves being the operative words. They are also usually done late in the writer's career when, can we talk, they have more memories than new ideas. All of which seems to be true here. There's usually no plot to this type of play, but that function is usually overtaken by a wealth of affectionately drawn, larger-than-life characters. Shows For Days has neither. A glaring absence considering the presence of Patti LuPone, someone who can play to the last row in a concert hall and still feel pinched.

In Mr. Beane's defense, he avoids the traps of nostalgia and sentimentality. Not that either is necessarily bad, but they can easily overwhelm a play like Shows For Days and the writers who are good with them are usually the ones who specialize in them. Beane, instead, is known for the sophisticated wit and social comment of As Bees In Honey Drown. Nothing like that here, either. The closest Douglas Carter Beane gets to ginning up some excitement is threatening the theater 
in which the story takes place with demolition. Yet, if the if the offstage sound of trees being chopped down in Chekhov's, The Cherry Orchard is up here, then the repeated offstage sound of a wrecking ball in Shows For Days is, well, down here.

Is Mr. Beane being overly faithful to events or too respectful of his old colleagues? Who can say? The result, however, is a show for dozing,
not days.

GOLDMAN SHARKS.

Good news for people who've always wanted to work with Goldman Sachs or trust them, but not both. As Jeremy Quittner writes in Inc. Magazine (6/17/15), Goldman intends to enter the personal finance business. Now, if you want a loan of fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, you can borrow from one of the world's leading investment banks. It doesn't matter if you have a small business or a large credit card bill, you can get into bed with people who've screwed the largest corporations directly and you indirectly through the financial crisis of 2008, for which they are largely responsible. How can you trust a bank that's made a business - literally,
a business - of selling their own clients short? It's very hard except one thing is in their favor: Goldman Sachs has already paid a fine of $550 million and promised the U.S. government not to engage in deliberate fraud again. It's slim reed to hang your trust on, I know, but it consider it the cost of visiting 200 West Street on business. 

Why, you may ask, is such a prestigious bank going from he baccarat table of advising governments to the slot machines of personal finance? Three reasons: one, they have repeatedly shown a contempt for their own reputation by being aggressively unethical and, only occasionally, illegal; two, their major stockholders don't care - go ahead, ask him - and, three, there's obviously a lot of money in it.

Tapping the low end of the consumer market is not a complete blight, however. There's one positive consequence: by offering personal loans, Goldman Sachs makes "payday" loans look respectable by comparison. 

A DIM VIEW OF 'SKYLIGHT.'

I was curiously disengaged by the current Broadway revival of the 1995 play, Skylight, by David Hare. The political symbolism rang as clear as a bell, but the emotions evaded me. Skylight concerns the reunion of a wealthy businessman, Tom Sergeant (Bill Nighy) and his former mistress, the principled, but penurious pedagogue, Kyra Hollis (Carey Mulligan). They were an ideal team once: the upper class (him) and the lower class (her) conspiring against the middle class (his wife). Now, he's a widower and they have no use for each other.

No ultimate use, that is. Tom may want the sex - and, perhaps, even the affection - he once had with Kyra and she would appreciate the standard of living to which he helped her become accustomed, but neither will compromise to get it. You might say they've grown apart, but the truth is that she has grown after he split them apart. (Their idyll ended when Tom betrayed Kyra by indirectly informing his wife about them.) He has, since then, gone on to even greater success as a restaurateur. While she has forged a career as a teacher who works - and lives - in the slums of London. Any rapprochement, though, is bound to be short-lived because Tom resolutely clings to his status and privileges
(think England under Margaret Thatcher) and
shows undisguised contempt for Kyra's liberal sympathies. They can't even return to their previous roles because who would they gang up on? The poor?  That would make Kyra middle class - something neither wants.

Swept, as they are, by confused alarms of struggle and flight, why do Tom and Kyra continue to clash by night? Her appeal is obvious: she's intelligent, spirited and - dowdy as she appears - looks like Carey Mulligan. His appeal is a good deal more dubious. One the one hand, he's vigorous, intelligent, self-possessed and - as embodied by Bill Nighy - tall. On the other, he's completely lacking in character. He couldn't be more of an empty suit if he was Clause Rains prancing as "The Invisible Man." It doesn't matter if the suit is by Anderson and Sheppard, Tom Sergeant is a monster of entitlement and treats Kra Hollis as if she were a balky appliance. How much, though, does that matter? How much of their relationship is predetermined - by class or their history together - and how much is controlled by them?

I watched the entire play - carefully - and I still don't know. Whatever emotions draw them together aren't as powerful  as the tastes and opinions that drive them apart. Oh, there's hunger here, but not for connection - it's for power. If the director, Stephen Daldry,
knows what mysterious force bins them, he's not letting on. Nor does the initial scene between Kyra and Tom's grown son, Edward (Matthew Beard), shed any light.

It may be useful here for me to admit a certain handicap. I find sometimes that British people speak with a self-effacing harrumph that swallows a lot of information before it reaches the American ear. A crucial impediment when - as in any play that has one set and two characters - the dialogue  takes on great importance. Most of the audience, however, responded heartily. They even laughed.

I wasn't moved to either tears or laughter. I wish I was.

U.K. EUCHRES EVERYONE.

When it comes to being unethical, British banks yield to no one. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of banking that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. 

              The End of the LIBOR Party.

Five global banks (Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland among them) must pay - according to MSN - a $5.7 billion fine for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate. It's not the crime that matters here - rigging a $350 trillion market for their private advantage - it's the punishment. Although $5.7 billion seems like a lot of money to me, it's nothing to a bank. It's a rounding error. They can dig it out of the couch in the chairman's office. Should it even begin to pinch, they can always pass the expense along to their customers.

It doesn't matter how big a fine a bank must pay, if it's more money than most people  can imagine, it will look like justice.

                            Heidi and Seek.

HSBC has, according to Zacks.com (6/8/15), agreed to pay $42.8 million to the Swiss authorities to settle allegations of money laundering. The news here isn't that a British bank has engaged in money laundering. Three years ago, Standard Chartered was fined $674 million by the U.S. government for secretly channeling $250 billion into the coffers of Iran. It's not even  that HSBC has done it. It was also in 2012 that HSBC paid the U.S. government $1.9 billion to settle charges of money laundering. The news is that this kind of activity is against the law in Switzerland, right? I would have bet my grandmother's gold fillings - in a Swiss vault somewhere - that it wasn't. HSBC, alone, has been implicated in hiding assets worth roughly $120 billion in 30,000 Swiss bank accounts. A great chunk of that coming from Mexican drug gangs. That's right, Mexican drug gangs. (If you want seven heads in a duffel bag, HSBC knows where to get them.) The Swiss, of course, must share part of the blame, but they have part of an excuse. Their banks have been struggling since 1945 to replace the business lost when their biggest client, The Third Reich, went under. (Why else would bubbie's  biters be resting in pieces?)

Not that American banks are willing to cede the moral low ground. Goldman Sachs, for instance, can always be depended on to mount an aggressive offense - or offensive aggression. (See TFT 1/31/14, 3/15/12, 7/20/10 ad nauseum ).