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Ignore the reviews. Go see Woody Allen’s latest film

Parker Posey plays an academic infatuated with Joaquin Phoenix's character.

Parker Posey plays an academic infatuated with Joaquin Phoenix's character.

irrational-man-review-graphicAs he grew older, American tennis writer and broadcaster Bud Collins would chide people who asked him if he still played the game.

“At what age,” he would ask derisively, “do people start inserting the word ‘still’ into questions like that? It’s ageist and it’s insulting.”

I’ve been mindful of the observation ever since – I was once on the receiving end of his rebuke – so I don’t make the following statement lightly: four months shy of his 80th birthday, Woody Allen is still making extraordinarily good movies. And we should be grateful for that.

His latest effort, Irrational Man, opens in Australian theatres this week and it’s a gem. Although you wouldn’t know that from reading the reviews of American critics who have reacted like they’ve been served limp lettuce in a Heston Blumenthal restaurant.

The movie completes a decade-long run of first-rate Allen films that started with Match Point in 2005 and rose to even greater heights with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Midnight in Paris (2011) and Blue Jasmine (2013).

Which prompts me to ask: what will Allen’s critics be doing in their seventies? Probably not producing a movie a year that at the very least entertains vast audiences and, often as not, delights.

Of course, there have been lesser movies in that 10-year period – Whatever Works, Magic In The Moonlight, To Rome With Love, among others – but it all adds up to an amazing body of work that would catapult a younger film-maker to fame if they’d offered up similar films in, say, their thirties or, God forbid, middle-age. (As Allen might say, I haven’t seen too many 160-year-olds walking around lately. But I’m hoping to soon.)

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Irrational Man falls somewhere between Allen’s best and his ‘worst’, although that’s usually pretty good. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as defeated and depressed philosophy professor Abe Lucas, who’s teaching summer school to students at Braylin College on picturesque Rhode Island.

Down and almost out, impotent and irascible, he shuffles from class to class, forever swigging from a whisky flask, bemoaning his state of mind and the career he’s chosen.

“I wanted to be a world-changer and I’ve ended up a passive intellectual who can’t f***,” he complains to his wide-eyed student, Jill Pollard, played by the bug-eyed Emma Stone.

This being an Allen film, they soon end up together. His detractors will point to the recurring theme of September-May romances and his own lifestyle choices. At least in this offering he has a fellow academic, played by the more age-appropriate Parker Posey, coming onto him as well. Lucas is a fixer-upper if ever there was one.

Parker Posey plays an academic infatuated with Joaquin Phoenix's character.

Parker Posey plays an academic in love with Joaquin Phoenix’s character.

Allen devotees will recognise other themes here too, including moral consequences, crime, punishment and industrial-strength existential crises. In fact, many of the themes were first raised in 1989’s Oscar-nominated Crimes and MisdemeanorsIrrational Man neatly intersects with that and Match Point.

Lucas – and the film – comes alive when he and Jill overhear a restaurant conversation that provokes him into taking extraordinary action to, as he sees it, make the world a better place.

In his first outing with Allen, Phoenix is terrific as he morphs from dysfunctional to driven, pursuing his terrible goal with purpose, even passion. The clever conclusion is a departure for the writer/director and the moral universe his characters usually inhabit.

Irrational Man is by no means a perfect film – Allen is a little too fond of voiceovers that tell us what we’ve already gleaned – but it has more intelligence in its first five minutes than Hollywood can usually conjure in two hours. I’m hoping he’s still making movies at 90.

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