This is not an easy time to write about a Woody Allen film. It’s been over a year since abuse allegations against the filmmaker by his daughter resurfaced, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that to stand behind one of his films is to stand behind a predator.This has come up again with regards to Allen’s latest movie, “Irrational Man.” Joaquin Phoenix stars as a brooding philosophy professor who waddles through campus paunch-first, with a flask in his back pocket and an excessive attachment to his Roussel and his Ray-Bans. Arriving at a college in Rhode Island for a summer teaching gig, he develops tormented relationships with a colleague (Parker Posey) and a student (Emma Stone), who both idolize him even though he’s miserable and constantly rhapsodizing on the futility of existence, as Allen’s characters are wont to do. Philosophy, as he tells his students at different points in the film, shuffling back and forth across the front of the classroom, is both “verbal posturing” and “verbal masturbation.”But things begin to turn around for the professor when he overhears a tear-stained conversation while eating at a local diner: a woman is about to lose her children in a custody battle because the judge is pat-on-the-back-pals with her ex-husband and his lawyer. She hopes that the lawyer dies of cancer, she cries while her friends console her. The professor, taken aback, decides to intervene. “It’s scary when you run out of distractions,” he says earlier in the film, discussing his current state-of-mind. Now he has found the ultimate distraction, a way to live the moral philosophy he teaches. He will kill the lawyer himself, and nobody will have any reason to suspect he did it.Now, it’s a more than a little strange that Allen would make a film about killing a judge over a custody hearing barely a year after court documents from more than two decades ago were released and reexamined, shedding light on the comedian’s own battles with a judge during a custody hearing. It’s also strange that Allen would make a film whose central love story involves an older man and a much-younger woman. I’ll concede that this could all be a coincidence — I have no idea when the movie was actually written, or what Allen was thinking when he created these characters. But the autobiographical connections are hard to ignore.In any case, there is nothing in “Irrational Man” that we haven’t seen in numerous other films by the comedian, except that his previous movies have been, for the most part, better. As he has gotten older his filmmaking has gotten lazier — the writing is often excessively broad while the direction gives the sense that Allen was taking regular naps in his sunhat during the shoot. It’s as if he’s painted himself into a corner and can’t escape his own artistic legacy or persona.What you know about an artist’s body of work and what is on the public record concerning his personal life undoubtedly informs your experience of his work. Some people are able to separate the art from the artist, while others cannot or simply refuse. It’s a personal choice with only personal consequences. I still watch Roman Polanski’s films despite the crimes he committed, and don’t feel guilty about it at all. But I think I’m done with Woody Allen for a different, and even simpler reason — unlike Polanski, Allen has stopped making work that is compelling, new, or interesting.
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