Irrational Man mixes Woody Allen's usual light and dark tones
Woody Allen has always been interested in man's search for meaning in life - a search he clearly sees as futile. Who can forget the young woman in Play It Again, Sam, staring at a Jackson Pollock painting and seeing "the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity"? That's not even the whole quote - but it could be Allen's mantra.
The director has also mined the themes of crime and punishment, including murder - think Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. All these threads - plus, of course, love and seduction - come together in his 45th feature, Irrational Man, which may not be his very best recent work, but is by far not his worst, either.
As in so many Allen films, even if some parts don't gel, others do. If Irrational Man falls short of late - career home runs like Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine, it also feels more fully realized than last year's visually gorgeous but otherwise uneven period piece, Magic in the Moonlight.
