Irrational Man (2015)

May 16, 2015 (Cannes), July 17, 2015 (United States)

Directed by Woody Allen

Screenplay by Woody Allen

Cinematography by Darius Khondji

Edited by Alisa Lepselter

Musical Theme: “The ‘In’ Crowd,” composed by Billy Page, performed by Ramsey Lewis Trio

Emma Stone as Jill Pollard

Joaquin Phoenix as Professor Abe Lucas

Parker Posey as Professor Rita Richards

Jamie Blackley as Roy, Jill’s boyfriend

Betsey Aidem as Jill’s mother

Ethan Phillips Jill’s father

Sophie Von Haselberg as April

Ben Rosenfield as April’s friend

Susan Pourfar as Carol

Produced by Gravier Production, Perdido Productions

Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics

When I first saw Irrational Man in the theater less than a year ago, I suggested that it might be a film about philosophy that was really a neo-noir. I was met with incredulity. My friends scoffed: How can you categorize a Woody Allen film as a neo-noir? And I suspect that you may be asking yourself that same question right now. I couldn’t convince all of my friends, but after seeing the film a second time on DVD, I am even more convinced that Irrational Man is a neo-noir.

The film opens with Abe Lucas driving along the Rhode Island shore. The setting is idyllic: summer in a seaside small town where tourists flock to enjoy the sun and the waves. But right away, Abe introduces a noir tone. In his internal voice-over, viewers hear: “Kant said human reason is troubled by questions it cannot dismiss but also cannot answer. Okay, so what are we talking about here? Morality? Choice? The randomness of life? Aesthetics? Murder?” Abe mentions murder at the very beginning. It’s on his mind, but why? Viewers know nothing about Abe’s past, and they don’t learn much about it as the movie progresses, and that’s a noir device with a slight alteration. Abe’s past seems to haunt him, as it does for many a film noir protagonist, but viewers never learn the details, just how it affects his actions later in the film.

The film switches to Jill Pollard and her internal voice-over: “I think Abe was crazy from the beginning. Was it from stress? Was it anger? Was he disgusted by what he saw as life’s never-ending suffering? Or was he simply bored by the meaninglessness of day-to-day existence? He was so damn interesting. And different. And a good talker. And he could always cloud the issue with words.” In retrospect, it seems, Jill would call Abe a smooth talker, a manipulator, something that she didn’t notice from the beginning, only in hindsight. And thus this story about murder, deception, and betrayal is told in flashback, and all are hallmarks of noir.

(This blog post about Irrational Man contains spoilers.)

The unwitting agent of fate in Irrational Man seems to be Jill. Jill is the one who overhears the conversation in the West Side Diner about Judge Spangler, and she is the one who invites Abe to listen in on that same conversation. In another sequence, Jill picks a flashlight when Abe gives her the choice of a prize after he wins a game at an amusement park. The flashlight plays an important part, in its own way, as an agent of fate. But it belongs to Jill, not to anyone else.

Jill seems to be the only character in Irrational Man to experience real angst. Jill expresses angst, fear, and suspicion when she hears Rita’s theory about Abe. Abe the philosophy professor spouts intellectual lines about despair and angst. He says that he is depressed from the beginning of the film until the moment he starts planning his crime. Rita doesn’t experience any angst at all. She would go to Spain with Abe whether or not her theory about his role in Judge Spangler’s murder is true. But Jill suffers more than enough angst to make up for Rita and even Abe. She is the one who is most emotionally invested.

Jill worries about her suspicions and her small role in what Abe may have done. She was in the West Side Diner with Abe and invited him to overhear the woman’s conversation about her custody lawsuit to be decided by Judge Spangler. Jill confronts Abe about the judge’s murder: “You can’t justify it. You can’t justify it with all this bullshit. With all this bullshit, French postwar rationalizing. This doesn’t . . . . This is murder. This is murder. It opens the door to more murder, Abe.” Later, in the same conversation, she tells Abe, “I don’t have the intellect to refute these arguments. I can’t argue with you. But you taught me go with my instinct and I don’t have to think about this. I feel that this is no good. This is murder.”

Some of the camera techniques underscore Jill’s angst. Her first kiss with Abe is distorted in a funhouse mirror. When she listens to her father read a newspaper account of Judge Spangler’s death, now ruled a homicide, she is standing behind a screen door, and the camera slowly tracks in to focus on her, looking trapped behind the screen. But even the mesh of the screen can’t hide the consternation on her face.

Earlier in the film, Jill mentions that Abe noted Hannah Arendt’s name in the margin of one of his books. The reference to Hannah Arendt is a reference to the postwar (post–World War II) period and the struggle to come to terms with Nazism and “the banality of evil.” From Wikipedia:

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by political theorist Hannah Arendt, was originally published in 1963. Arendt’s subtitle famously introduced the phrase “the banality of evil,” which also serves as the final words of the book. In part, at least, the phrase refers to Eichmann’s deportment at the trial, displaying neither guilt nor hatred, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job” (“He did his duty . . . ; he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law” p. 135). (emphasis added)

Abe justifies everything he does in terms of philosophy, but he never once allows for human emotion. Even his depression is an absence of emotions, and it’s something he soaks in large quantities of alcohol. He feels alienated from the rest of the world, and he mentions this often throughout the film. Here is his interior monologue after overhearing the woman’s conversation about her custody battle (he and Jill are in the West Side Diner, and Jill has invited Abe to hear what she was hearing): “He [Judge Spangler] won’t get cancer. Because wishing doesn’t work. If you [the woman in the custody battle] want him dead, you have to make it happen. But you’d never be able to pull it off, and even if you did, you’d be prime suspect. On the other hand, I could kill him for you, lady, and no one in the world would dream I did it. I could rid you of this roach and end all your suffering. It was at this moment that my life came together. I could perform this blessing for that poor woman and no one would ever connect me to it.”

Abe claims that his actions are based on his existential need to feel alive, but he has a taste for murder and the excitement it brings to his life. This is his internal monologue while he paces his classroom and his students take an exam: “The police had their suspect. Rita Richards, who was never really serious about suspecting me, would see it was another man and that her crackpot theory was crackpot. The morality of letting someone take the rap troubled me greatly, but paled against the hardwiring of my natural will survive. Europe with Rita was beginning to have an exciting ring to it. . . . Only one thing stood in the way. I had a few days before Jill would insist that I clear the wrongfully accused man. Was there a way to keep her from talking? I guess she was right when she said that one murder opens the door to more.” And so Abe is on his way to betraying Jill.

In the end, Jill is almost squeaky clean. Abe was depressed at the start of the film, and his intentions are masked by his depression and the way that he talks about it. Viewers don’t learn anything about his past or why he is thinking about murder from the start of the film. In Irrational Man, “the banality of evil” comes in the form of depression for Abe’s character, and in the beautiful setting—the Rhode Island coastline in summer—for the film. These features make good and evil hard to spot for the characters and for the viewers.

Jill closes the film with her thoughts about her experiences: “Every now and then, I reflected on the whole episode. And with hindsight, gained some perspective about life and love, and who I was. I even experienced, for one terrifying moment, the closeness of death. The whole thing had been quite a lesson. A painful lesson. The kind Abe used to say you can’t get from any textbook.”

So I wonder about the main point in Irrational Man. Maybe the main point is that we cannot really know how we would choose, how we would act, unless we are faced with real choices between shades of gray, not between black and white, not between good and evil. Life is rarely like a textbook example, after all. It rarely offers simple choices that are obviously good or obviously evil. And offering that idea to ponder is about as noir as a film can get.