Allen’s latest is all over the place

‘Irrational Man’ has wild swings in tone, but still pulls it off.

Forty-five features into his half-century of moviemaking, the rote obsessions distinguishing Woody Allen’s furtive protagonists — luck, fate, chance, getting away with murder — have extended more and more to Allen’s own approach to screenwriting.

A mixture of the obvious and the indecisive, “Irrational Man” stars Joaquin Phoenix as philosophy professor Abe Lucas, new arrival to fictional Braylin College in Newport, R.I. He’s notorious for being a drunk, a womanizer, a provocateur. Emma Stone is one of his students, Jill Pollard, drawn to Abe’s brooding pessimism and self-destruction because it is so, so infernally sexy. Also, Abe would never wear teal Polo shirts (teal being the shorthand color for “callow, moneyed youth”), whereas Jill’s callow, moneyed boyfriend ( Jamie Blackley) would. Proudly.

Dining with Abe over candlelight, Stone is required to say things like: “I love that you order for me.” Really? Big-footing the menu? Is that appealing in any man on any planet? We’re meant to take Abe’s smarmy passivity and increasingly desperate coping mechanisms straight, no chaser.

At a restaurant Abe and Jill overhear a conversation about a corrupt familycourt judge and a woman losing custody of her children. Abe decides to act as anonymous sinner-saint. The film’s second half chronicles the execution of Abe’s murderous deed and the aftermath.

Comedies, dramas or in between, we don’t go to Woody Allen for realism. Allen is no dummy, but he is also not his own best editor or critic. The tone here is all over the place.

Stone responds to the material with some effective ambiguity in her reaction shots, in between the lines, but both she and Phoenix are playing notquite-humans, and Phoenix can barely get through some of the clumsier dialogue alive. Photographed in warm, pretty tones by the ace Darius Khondji, the film paradoxically saves its most vivid shot for an icy close-up of Abe, seconds after putting his plan in motion, breathing hard and looking wild-eyed. For a moment, “Irrational Man” shows us some verifiably human behavior.

CONTRIBUTED BY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Joaquin Phoenix plays a bitter philosophy professor and Emma Stone plays his student in “Irrational Man.”