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.