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BIRDMAN or the unexpected virtue of ignorance
DIRECTOR: Alejandro González Iñárritu
CAST: Michael Keaton, Lindsay Duncan, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough and Amy Ryan
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LV
RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes
RATING: ****
IN BIRDMAN or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, Michael Keaton (pictured) plays an actor named Riggan Thomson, who first appears hovering several inches above his dressing room floor, deep in meditation.
He’s trying to ignore the voice of the title character, his alter ego, who takes the form of the comic book character he once played and whose superpowers he now seems able to conjure at the drop of a black leather cowl.
“How did we end up here?” Birdman growls. “This place is horrible.”
“This place” is revealed to be backstage at New York’s St James Theatre, where Thomson is directing and starring in an ambitious, and no doubt profoundly ill-advised, adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story.
As if that bid for artistic legitimacy isn’t fraught enough, Thomson also is trying to grapple with the personal life he neglected for years while pursuing fame in Hollywood, including his fractured relationship with his daughter, Sam (Stone), a new girlfriend (Riseborough) and his ex-wife, Sylvia (Ryan).
From this setup alone, Birdman has all the trappings of a tawdry backstage satire, but writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu throws in a delightfully wacky monkey wrench in the form of a pretentious actor named Mike Shiner (Norton), who’s cast in the play at the last minute when a member of the ensemble is injured.
The moment Shiner appears on the scene, the strutting and fretting are kicked up a notch, with Norton gleefully, even courageously, throwing himself into a performance that showcases the subtleties of acting nuance but also makes him look utterly ridiculous as a performer of surpassing arrogance and overweening vanity.
Narcissism, ambition, insecurity and the wages of celebrity are addressed in one fell swoop in Birdman, which Iñárritu and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, have filmed to resemble one long, unbroken take – a stunt that results in a film of delicate, even balletic, grace and one that poetically captures Thomson’s state of mind. Tuned in, hyper-aware, he moves through the world on a different frequency than his peers, or so he thinks: through just a few casual gestures the complicated, contradictory headspace Thomson occupies becomes palpable and real. Once a superstar, now human scale, he walks the boards and Broadway streets like a hungry ghost, searching for the potency his cartoonish persona once conferred, while simultaneously trying to escape the culture of pandering and cynicism he helped to create.
As much fun as Birdman is to watch from a technical and aesthetic standpoint, it gains untold layers of meaning from the presence of Keaton, whose own career as the big-screen Batman that launched a never-ending franchise is clearly one of Iñárritu’s inspirations. As critical as Birdman is of the idea of the calculated Hollywood comeback, the film manages to be just that.
Keaton’s performance, as Thomson and the éminence grise hovering over his shoulder, is a triumph – a quiet, un-showy master class in humour, pathos, physical vulnerability and dimly dawning wisdom that seems always to be disappearing around one of the St James’ labyrinthine corners.
Keaton is given ample support from a lively ensemble, including the sly, scene-stealing Norton, the feisty Stone, Naomi Watts as the production’s idealistic ingenue and Zach Galifianakis, here almost unrecognisable as Thomson’s best friend and producer.
Urged along by a musical score that consists mostly of percussive drumming and snatches of classical pieces, the actors hit their marks in a meticulously choreographed dance that swoops and swirls with brash, contagious brio.
Iñárritu, whose films include Babel and 21 Grams, has always been prone to his own brand of overworked pretentiousness. His movies are little more than melodramas burnished with the patina of arty conceits and empty formalism. But the bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humour, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.
At another time, the preoccupations of Birdman – with relevance, artifice and the meaning of mass acclaim – might have been considered merely those of the rich and famous. But as Stone’s character makes clear, technology and social media have made them germane to anyone with an iPhone and a Twitter account. With grandeur, giddiness and a humanistic nod toward transcendence, Birdman vividly evokes a time of equal parts possibility and terrifying uncertainty, and makes a persuasive case that, when the ground is shifting beneath your feet, the best thing to do is to take flight. – Washington Post
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