Left to right: Parker Posey as Rita and Emma Stone as Jill in Irrational Man.Sabrina Lantos
Parker Posey is on the phone from New York, and the line is occasionally breaking up. I have the impression she might be outdoors on a cell phone. She's talking about one of her ideas for a new YouTube or Web series.
The title is Dogs Playing Poker, named after the classic kitsch paintings to advertise cigars by C.M. Coolidge in the early 1900s.
The dogs, in this case, will represent various literary personages in canine form, with human actors providing their voices. Sylvia Plath as a hairless Chinese crested, reciting her bone-chilling father-as-Nazi poem, Daddy, while William Faulkner, as a Labrador, offers his response. Various other authors from history, in their dog incarnations, can chime in.
Posey – who played the character Meg Swan, aficionado of Weimaraners and J. Crew catalogues in Christopher Guest's great mockumentary Best in Show – is, in real life, a dog person, owner of 11-year-old Gracie, a famous bichón-Maltese mix (characterized by the gossip site Gawker as a "devil dog"). These days, she explains, for actors to initiate personal projects, Hollywood is a producer-driven, genre-oriented place, and the true auteurs are a rarity, which makes it hard for someone like her to find regular work.
In the summer of 2014, Parker Posey was going through a low period. At 45, she was at a critical age for women in Hollywood, and the actress Time magazine had once dubbed the Queen of the Indies when she was in her late twenties was scrambling for work.
That may not have been obvious to television viewers. In 2012, Posey did a brilliant two-episode arc on Louis C.K.'s show Louie, playing a disturbed but inspiring woman who shakes up the titular character's world, that was a creative high point of the series.
Posey was likewise a familiar face in TV series from Portlandia to The Good Wife, but regular mainstream work eluded her. At loose ends, she accepted an invitation to serve as a juror in a film festival in Krakow, Poland. One of her fellow jurors was Juliet Taylor, Woody Allen's casting coach. They lost their luggage together on the way back to New York on a Monday night.
The next Wednesday, Posey got a call to come by Allen's office to meet him. A day later, she was told she had a part in his new film, Irrational Man, which opens in theatres today. Her response was to burst into tears.
"I was the right type, and I was the right temperature for the role," Posey says. "It's about a woman who is feeling very trapped and is suffering."
Although reviewers routinely criticize Allen for his depiction of romances between older men and younger women, actresses tend to be far more positive about his female characters. (Parker, for the record, has said in previous interviews that she considers the revived allegations of child molestation against Allen as a "separate thing" from his significance as a filmmaker.)
In fact, Allen continues to be a magnet for performers. He has directed 18 Oscar-nominated performances, most recently Cate Blanchett's Oscar-winning turn in 2013's Blue Jasmine.
As for Irrational Man, from the 20 pages of script Posey received – her dialogue only – she had no idea whether the film was a tragedy or a comedy. A few weeks later, just before the cameras started to roll, Allen told her (she slides easily into a pitch-perfect impression of his hesitant nasal stammer): "She's a very … very … lonely woman."
(When asked about casting Posey at the Cannes Film Festival, where Irrational Man had its premiere in May, Allen said, "I just liked the idea of going onto the set and saying, 'Where's Parker Posey?'"
Allen must have really enjoyed it; he has already cast Posey in his next untitled film.
In Irrational Man, Posey's character, Rita, is an unhappily married science professor, who launches herself like a heat-seeking missile at bad-boy philosophy professor Abe (Joaquin Phoenix), fully determined to bed him and then run away to Spain.
Instead, Abe becomes infatuated with a young student (Emma Stone), along with the idea of committing a crime that will give his life purpose.
With Posey's characteristic near-manic intensity, she seemed to me to be the film's least neurotic, most life-affirming character. Posey doesn't exactly agree.
"Well, she is trapped," Posey says. "The students think she's crazy, which is how they feel about older people who want things. Why are women always described as 'desperate' while men are just … irrational?"
Allen's movie posits the familiar existential idea that having a purpose for living, even a bad purpose, is what keeps us going. What purpose helps her carry on?
Her answer is projects like Dogs Playing Poker:
"These fantasies in my head, these little vanity projects, but, not vanity. They're necessary," she says.
A publicist cuts in on the line: Time for just one more question.
I can't help asking: Considering the amount of frustration the business causes her, what does she actually get out of acting?
"What do I get out of acting?" Posey says, as if the question is preposterous.
"I get to enter into the world the director has created, to live these different lives on top of my own life. And I get suffering and rejection, and I'm forced to find friends for support …"
She's still talking but the line breaks up again. By the time it comes clear again 30 seconds later, there isn't time to ask her to repeat her answer. "So, lots and lots?" I venture.
"Lots and lots – and lotsa luck," she says with a farewell burst of laughter.