Joaquin Phoenix wears an Omega Seamaster

On a bright afternoon in a Rhode Island town, Abe Lucas pulls Jill into him under a tree, his hand spread across her shoulder, and for a moment the most clearly photographed thing in the shot is the watch on his left wrist. It is a round gold dress watch on a dark brown leather strap, a cream dial with applied baton markers and slim hands, no date window, no rotating bezel, nothing sporty about it at all. Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe, a philosophy professor who has arrived at a small college in a fog of existential depression. He drinks, he can no longer write, he drifts into an affair with a student played by Emma Stone. Then he overhears a stranger's legal troubles in a diner and decides that committing a murder might finally give his life some meaning. Woody Allen wrote and directed Irrational Man in 2015, and like much of his late work it splits viewers cleanly, half finding it tired and half finding it comfortable.

The watch suits the man more than it suits the actor. Abe is the kind of academic who would have bought one good watch decades ago and never replaced it, and what he wears reads exactly like that: a vintage gold-plated dress piece, the sort Omega built by the thousand through the middle of the last century, well before any modern sports-dress model carried the same family name. You cannot read the dial in the frame, so the precise model stays open, but the shape tells you what it is not. It is not a steel diver, not a chronograph, not anything you would wear to look current. It is a quiet, slim, old watch on the wrist of a man who has stopped trying to impress anyone, which is its own kind of accuracy on Allen's part.

There is one small joke buried in the cataloguing of all this. For years this sighting was filed as an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra, a steel twenty-first-century watch that did not exist until 2002. The man on screen is wearing a gold dress watch old enough to be his own father's. Look at the wrist, the frame keeps insisting, and the record finally did.