Boys will be boys, but… man, oh man

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This article was published 01/08/2015 (3876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I saw two movies this week. Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation, the latest Tom Cruise action-adventure flick, and Irrational Man, the latest Woody Allen treatise on the meaninglessness of existence. Guess which one is an adolescent male fantasy?

Trick question. They both are! Woody’s form of filmic wish-fulfilment is just better disguised, because the characters are talking about Kierkegaard and quoting Simone de Beauvoir.

Sure, M:I5 is a Tom Cruise vanity project. As usual, the 53-year-old star gets to ride a motorcycle really fast, hang off something really high, and exchange intense glances with a really beautiful woman. At one point, someone describes Cruise’s character, the unstoppable, unkillable Ethan Hunt, as “the living manifestation of destiny.”

Likewise, Irrational Man could be viewed as a Woody Allen vanity project. Physical feats are replaced by unchallenged intellectual brilliance, but the tone of awed idol worship is the same. This is teen fantasy by way of the chess club.

In his 45th film, Woody’s stand-in is philosophy professor Abe Lucas (a sleepy, mumbly Joaquin Phoenix). Impotent, depressed, difficult, half-drunk, sick of life Abe seems like an unlikely hero. But he’s just as much a fantasy character as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. To paraphrase that Mission: Impossible line, Abe could be described as “the living manifestation of existential dread.” In one scene he plays Russian roulette — with three bullets! — just to demonstrate the randomness of human life.

Abe is “brilliant” and “charismatic” and “radical” and “original.” Everyone in the film keeps telling us this, though it’s never actually demonstrated on-screen. “So damn fascinating,” murmurs Jill Pollard, the precocious student who follows Abe around with wide-eyed adoration. (Literally wide-eyed, because Jill is played by the preternaturally wide-eyed Emma Stone, Allen’s muse since Scarlett Johansson aged out.)

Like the Mission: Impossible team, Irrational Man’s fantasy characters have their very own fantasy universe, a leafy, sun-dappled New England campus where everyone meets at the library, student debt is for other people and professor-student love affairs are apparently no big deal.

The storyline is yet another iteration of Allen’s persistent personal fantasy, in which a grumpy aging genius, paralyzed by thoughts of his own mortality, is pursued by a smitten, free-spirited young woman.

Remember Manhattan (1979), when Allen’s 42-year-old character was dating a girl who did homework? At the time, it seemed like a quirk. (In retrospect, of course, a creepy quirk. Even hardcore Allen fans prefer to view Manhattan as a love letter to New York City rather than a love letter to a high-school student.)

Now Allen’s May-November relationships have become an exhausted cliché, whether they involve Allen himself, paired with Helen Hunt or Mira Sorvino, or surrogates Larry David and Colin Firth, mismatched with Evan Rachel Wood and Emma Stone, respectively. Allen’s go-to romantic plot has become as predictable as Tom Cruise taking down a plane full of Chechen terrorists.

Irrational Man also includes a crime story, another Allen staple, but it’s a wan echo of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), when Allen actually wrassled with moral issues and Dostoyevsky was more than just a cheap name-drop.

Of course, lots of artists work with repeated themes, and it’s sometimes the obsessive, inescapable nature of these themes that makes the artists great.

But in the last 20 years, Allen has become both prolific and lazy, turning out a movie a year but not bothering to do much with them. It’s not just that Allen keeps falling back on fixed ideas, but that these ideas have become so stunted and self-absorbed.

Allen’s screenplays often seem less like cinematic art and more like philosophy-student fan-fiction. Woody’s tendency to over-identify with his protagonist — usually a neurotic, misanthropic intellectual who is improbably irresistible to the Emma Stones of this world — turns his characters into puppets, drains his plots of any real conflict, and transforms his dialogue into repetitive, declamatory parroting.

A veneer of talky, grown-up sophistication remains in Irrational Man — Abe namechecks Kant and Hume and the French existentialists — but it can’t hide the film’s emotional immaturity.

Back in 1979, critic and writer Joan Didion had already identified Allen’s vision as essentially adolescent: “The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors,” she argued in The New York Review of Books, “are… presented as adults… but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, ‘class brains,’ acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life.”

At the time, smack in the middle of Allen’s Golden Age, Didion’s dismissal of the filmmaker’s New York highbrows as “faux adults” was a minority opinion. Now, after decades of tepid, tossed-off films, it seems depressingly prescient.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca