Irrational Man review: Irrational working practices

We manage to consume television drama in discrete quanta at weekly (sometimes hourly) intervals, so it shouldn’t be asking too much to digest one Woody Allen film a year. Yet it sometimes feels as if we’re being fed continuous Allen through a fire hose.

You've just managed to splutter your way through the underwhelming Magic in the Moonlight when the more interesting Irrational Man comes hurtling down the tube.

As in that 2014 release, this year’s Allen asks a game Emma Stone to fall for an older man. Here, rather than the fifty-something Colin Firth, she is permitted to spoon with the 40-year-old Joaquin Phoenix.

She is a clever student. He is an academic who, rendered impotent by some sort of existential crisis, finds meaning from a thought experiment that might lead to murder. Magic in the Moonlight was trying to be a comedy. Lord alone knows what Irrational Man wants to be, but it is entertaining to watch the identity crisis unfurl.

The best comparison might be with the vastly superior Crimes and Misdemeanours. That film kept its comic and tragic plots distinct. In Irrational Man, a similar crisis to that suffered by Martin Landau in the earlier film is played out through the rhythms of poisonous screwball comedy.

But the tone is puzzlingly antic throughout. If it really were Allen's intention to banish comedy then he would hardly have scored the entire film to the Ramsey Lewis Trio's version of The In Crowd. Phoenix delivers the quotes from de Beauvoir, Dostoevsky and Heidegger with a glibness suitable for one of the director's own comic intellectual neurotics.

Maybe, the tonal uncertainty is a result of Allen’s famously rapid, occasionally slipshod working practices. But it adds undeniable juice to a film that might otherwise slump into the bottom thirties of the Allen rankings. Darius Khondji’s lovely CinemaScope photography and the sparkling performances also helps elevate its status to round about 28 of the 44 Allen films.DONALD CLARKE