Birdman
In the latest film from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) — a darkly funny satire called Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) — Michael Keaton, an aging actor best known for playing a caped superhero (Batman) in several films, plays Riggan Thomson, an aging actor best known for playing a caped superhero (Birdman) in several films. In an effort to revitalize his career and prove to himself and others that he’s a “serious actor,” Riggan stages a Broadway adaptation of the famous Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
He’s accompanied by his friend and producer Jake (Zach Galifianakis, Muppets Most Wanted); his younger girlfriend, Laura (Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion); first-time Broadway actress Lesley (Naomi Watts, Diana); an impromptu replacement method actor famous for his abrasive personality, Mike Shiner (an expertly cast Edward Norton, The Grand Budapest Hotel); and his recently out-of-rehab daughter Sam (Emma Stone, Magic in the Moonlight).
Throughout the mounting problems disrupting the play’s several preview runs, Riggan is haunted by the masked vision of Birdman, who drips poisonous words into Riggan’s mind with a deep rasp reminiscent of Christian Bale’s Batman. The Birdman specter is one of many forays the film takes into the dreamworld, along with an off-kilter sense of time and several bizarre powers Riggan appears to possess when no one is looking. The elaborate construction and parallels of the play being adapted, the world of Birdman’s characters and the real-world inspirations behind the casting choices feed into a surreal blending of reality that works as the film’s greatest strength.
Birdman pulses with an energy and sense of urgency heightened by the sense that the entire film is one long take, an inaccurate but believable idea based in the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity). The camera circles around its characters, following their movements through the cramped backstage, and soars over the streets of New York with the sense that the several weeks of the film’s time line all take place in one continuous shot.
There’s a chaotic drum score throughout most of the film that feeds into the dreamlike nature of the story, with the camera swooping past actual drummers playing the music the audience hears while located in places drummers wouldn’t be.
Birdman already has been labeled pretentious by a number of critics despite its mostly positive reviews. Characters pontificate about the value of true art and authenticity while decrying the trends of superhero blockbusters and action movies saturated with special effects. The script is preachy at times and often too on-the-nose, with critics portrayed as the ultimate evil and ideas such as “A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing” displayed prominently on Riggan’s dressing-room mirror. It’s hard not to see the film as Iñárritu’s artistically raised middle finger to the world of critics, a defiant statement that you can’t review a piece of art if you can’t make art yourself.
It’s easy to dismiss Birdman as pretentious, but to do so is to diminish the true meaning of the film. Yes, it’s about how we shouldn’t “confuse love with admiration,” but even more so, Birdman examines the idea that all art is just a plea to be loved, or at least acknowledged as a person. Sam has several exchanges with Riggan in which she confronts him with social media, which Riggan — and, it seems, Iñárritu — despises. But she argues rather convincingly that social media is the same as art, a way of yelling out into a vast world that “I exist” and hoping that someone, somewhere, cares.
For all its technical prowess, artistic platitudes and complexly layered storytelling, Birdman is an honest examination of the fears that come with baring your true self for the sake of art. There’s a real chance that someone will tear your work down in a way that’s hard not to see as a personal attack.
Birdman thrives in its contradictions, in the space it carves out between earnestness and pretension. Its themes are displayed too obviously at times, and some of them don’t quite sit well. However, none of that diminishes the great performances this cast pulls off, or the imagination of its creators and the excellent parallels among the various levels of the plot. Birdman is an honest and magical mess of a film and one of the year’s best.
