Movie Muser

Woody Allen obviously has a thing about murder. It led to one of his finest films, Crimes and Misdemeanours, one of his lightest, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and one of his absolute worst, Match Point. Here he combines it with his love of philosophy, and the result is a strange beat, neither a comedy – there are very few laughs – or a serious discussion. The tone is all over the place, and the result is strangely alienating. It’s all a bit meh.

We’re right in classic Allen territory, a campus in New England, with lots of pretty young students, grumpy old men, golden sunsets, knackered cars and lots and lots of talking about philosophy. Joaquin Phoenix is Abe, a classic dissolute man in a mid-life crisis who arrives at the sleepy university to teach philosophy to eager students. His arrival will ‘put the Viagra’ back into the campus, says fellow lecturer Rita (Parker Posey), and she does her best to sleep with him and cure his writers’ block. It doesn’t work, as Abe cannot write any more than he can perform sexually, maybe he needs a muse.

She duly arrives in the form of Jill (Emma Stone), a bright student who is utterly star-struck by Abe’s weary view of the world. He preaches life is all chance, helping people seems to make no difference, and she is completely besotted with him, despite his whiskey breath and pot belly. “He’s just so interesting” she says, at least four times, just to make sure we get the point. Before rattling off a frankly unlikely list of deeds he’s done, including going to help out in New Orleans.

Her sunny disposition seems to make no difference to Abe’s mood until the pair overhear a conversation in a diner. Abe is so moved by it he decides to take action and plan a murder, and suddenly his life changes, He feels free, he can perform in the bedroom again, and he can write. Everyone is baffled, until the murder is carried out with terrible consequences for all of them.

If you were making a check list of Allen films you would tick most of the boxes here. Jazz soundtrack, lovely photography of autumn light, old battered cars, and lots of discussion about Kierkergaard. It’s all starting to look tiresome, especially the long scenes of Abe’s lectures – is this a film or a recording of Allen’s lecturer fantasy? He actually writes in the film’s notes “I don’t think that anything I’ve written or dramatized has any originality philosophically – I’m simply a product of the philosophers I’ve read”. That’s exactly the problem here, it’s a book acted out on screen, with some added stuff about random chance and the nature of life taking its revenge eventually. Anyone who has seen Match Point or Crimes and Misdemeanours or even the wretched Cassandra’s Dream has seen this stuff before, and while it’s nowhere near as bad as the British films, it’s still nowhere near vintage Allen.

He has often been criticised for his white male world, and here he tries to make up for it by having Stone’s character doing the voiceover. He is clearly more interested in Abe than Jill though, as she is pretty much a cipher of a star-struck student happy to follow around the slovenly, porky Abe who, let’s face it, is hardly a bag of laughs to be around. In one scene he plays Russian roulette, just to reinforce his world view.

Ultimately it’s the performances which keep the interest here. Phoenix is perfectly cast as the hedonistic Abe, who barely cracks a smile through the film despite attractive women throwing themselves at him. He has genuine chemistry with Stone’s Jill, and she is perfectly relaxed and sprightly. She even manages to survive Allen’s insistence that she wears very short shorts and tiny dresses throughout the film, while Abe has the llen uniform of chinos and green flannel shirts.

Overall verdict: Middling Allen in which his ideas get lost in a barrage of verbiage and slow plotting, almost saved by fine performances and some pretty photography. Nowhere near Match Point-bad, but equally as far away from Crimes and Misdemeanours excellence.

Reviewer: Mike Martin