Taking Woody Allen to task

Have you ever noticed how the characters in Woody Allen’s films are calculating and manipulative? In “Irrational Man,” his latest film, the main characters are Abe Lucas (played by Joaquin Phoenix), an alcoholic, rakish professor, and the two women who share his bed:  Jill Pollard (played by Emma Stone), one of his students, and Rita Richards (played by Parker Posey), an unhappily married colleague. All three know exactly what they want:  love (Jill), control (Abe) and sex (Rita). Characters so focused also appear in the novels of genre writers like Danielle Steel and in TV soap operas, where unlike real people, they not only know exactly what they want but go after it, as if the path were a straight line.

But Allen’s characters are mostly intellectual and reflective, which usually lends a measure of imagination and confusion to their pursuit of happiness. They are most often well-to-do “’haves” whose concerns are not the hoi polloi’s. They have no money problems (not survival-type, anyway) or chores (other people take care of these). Sex figures largely in their lives. Self-absorption drives the plots. In four films where murder figures (“Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point,” “Cassandra’s Dreams” and this latest film), one commits it.   

Unfortunately, the characters in “Irrational Man” are not believable. Jill Pollard, the college student, has the self-assurance of a woman much older. Where is the vulnerable ego, the mood swings, the maybe-I-don’t-know-everything hesitation of even the cockiest of coeds?   Why does she lust after Abe but not after her seemingly perfect boyfriend Roy (played by Jamie Blackley)? Could it be because she is mesmerized by the professor’s big belly, which the camera shows us too often? Perhaps she secretly yearns to be pregnant? She pursues Abe without any signs of self-doubt, assuring Roy all along that everything is fine, and apparently doesn’t much mind that the professor has another bed partner.