(USA, 118
min.)
Dir.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Writ. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicholás Giacobone,
Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo
Starring : Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis , Edward Norton,
Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma
Stone, Naomi Watts
 |
| Michael Keaton as Riggan and Edward Norton as Mark in Birdman. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures |
Michael Keaton, Batman himself, hit so rock bottom a few
years ago that his biggest credit in the few years preceding Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of
Ignorance), aside from a supporting role in RoboCop, is the 2013 thriller/inadvertent comedy Penthouse North. Penthouse North is so cheap and ridiculous that it substitutes both
Manhattan and Afghanistan with a refurbished No Frills grocery in the middle of
suburban Ottawa—yes, Ottawa. Filmmaking doesn’t get much lower for a Hollywood
icon than shooting a Netflix-grade turkey in a bankrupt Canadian grocery store.
The silver lining of Penthouse
North, however, is that virtually nobody saw it except for this here
blogger, a few passholders and some “yay,
local content!” people who caught the film when it screened at the Ottawa
Little Theatre at OIFF 2013. It’s funny to see the low of Keaton’s career on a
movie screen in a dramatic theatre, since the high of his career—Birdman—takes live theatre, kicks it in
the pants, and reinvents the art form. Birdman
is a marvellous film experience and much of this credit is largely due to
Keaton’s fearless reinvention of himself as an actor in the vein of Mickey
Rourke’s comeback in The Wrestler. Keaton's career-best performance is a thrill and it's one of the most unique feats of screen acting
in years.
Birdman heralds
something new, insane, and brilliant when it opens with Keaton’s character
Riggan Thomson levitating in his tighty whities while nattering to himself that
the playhouse dressing room smells like balls. The weird thing is that the voice
the audience first hears in Birdman
isn’t Riggan’s. It’s that of Birdman, the superhero Riggan played years ago.
Riggan speaks in a lower Birdman voice much similar to Christian Bale’s oft-lampooned
“Batman voice.” Riggan, a character defined by delusions of grandeur,
self-mythology, self-deprecation, and perhaps some mild form of schizophrenia,
is a zany mass of contractions that few actors receive the pleasure of
untangling.
Keaton gutsily leaps into the role and offers a case of art
imitating life that’s almost too good to be true as Riggan consumes himself
with his self-directed Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story
“What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” with hopes of reinventing himself
as an actor. The play is a step away from the cloak and cape that define him as
a Hollywood has-been. Keaton, rather, takes the part and grabs it by the
throat, since Birdman is a
sophisticated piece of cinema that largely rests on the strengths of its
actors. Superhero stars are rarely perceived to be doing much heavy lifting in
the movies, aside from showcasing some CGI strength, yet Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) shoots the film in jaw-dropping long takes that demand the
ensemble to play out massive chunks of dialogue without a break. Keaton unmasks
himself completely and plays a range of emotions—crazy, funny, desperate, and
grandiose—on a nimble scale and he shows a range of superpowers greater than
anything the likes of Batman or Birdman keep hidden in their armour.
Alejandro González Iñárritu, who drops the ‘González’ this
time for a cleaner ‘G.’ in the credits, injects the film with the intense
emotional realism that defines his previous works, like 21 Grams, Babel, or Amorres Perros. He and DP Emanuel
Lubezki manoeuver around the wings of Broadway’s St. James theatre (and a
Hollywood set) and get up close in the actors’ faces while skirting around the
space of the theatre in extended movements that melt the raw, intense emotion
of the actors into the form of the film itself. The fluid long takes of Birdman mesh brilliantly with its backstage
setting, since Riggan and Keaton’s comeback becomes an actor’s showpiece. The
ensemble is terrific overall—there’s not a false note among the cast—with
Keaton’s work really operating in a league of its own while Edward Norton is
uproariously cocky and Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough are especially
feisty.
The nature of the film also calls upon the actors to achieve
the tricky feat of acting for the camera by performing on stage on film. The
tangible theatricality of Birdman
gives this biting satire weight and grandeur, since its evisceration of
stardom, celebrity, and pseudo-artistic BS is spot-on. (The dark humour and
sarcastic tone of Birdman is very
precise and very, very funny.) Anything that’s the slightest bit overblown
shows the absurdity of Riggan’s fanaticism, while the offstage scenes downplay
the drama and pull the characters down to earth. Both the onstage and offstage
moments feel equally authentic since Iñárritu lets them play out in one fluid
take. There’s as much honesty in performance for an actor as there is in life
itself, and Birdman sublimely allows
the actors to feel more real and relatable the more it lets them show off.
The cinematically theatrical form of Birdman makes the film an experience a true original. The virtue of
ignorance in Birdman is one’s obliviousness
of the edits that merge the shots together, since the wonder to digital editing
allows the shots to fuse more seamlessly than they have ever before. Birdman features some stealthy long take
trickery in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s fake long take film Rope, in which the edits camouflage
themselves amongst the movement of the camera, and editors Douglas Crise and
Stephen Mirrone faultlessly step between doorways and interior/exterior space
without revealing the edits. Birdman,
then, feels like live theatre on film or like theatre come to life. It has an
energy unto itself, a form unto itself, as What
We Talk about When We Talk about Love unfurls with more depth and substance
than it could ever have on stage since Iñárritu reveals aspects of the
production to which no member of the audience could have a vantage point. The
intimate glimpses into the production reveal what inspires the actors as they
forge and shape their characters, and it shows how life becomes art as they walk
in one unbroken shot from the world of rehearsals to the world of the stage.
Then there’s the character of Birdman, who ensures that the
film isn’t all about hoity-toity theatre. Riggan is, after all, a precursor to
the superhero craze that’s sweeping Hollywood into an unending onslaught of
Marvel movies. Riggan, like Keaton, is to blame for an excess of capes and
paychecks that taint talented actors like Michael Fassbender, Woody Harrelson,
and “that guy from The Hurt Locker.”
(Birdman has a lot of fun naming
names.) The base-ness of being an action star versus being an actor runs
through Birdman like the hypnotic
insecurities of Nina’s drive in Black
Swan as Riggan battles his inner monologue with Birdman and sizes up his
own inadequacies by padding himself with supernatural powers.
Several people call Riggan out on being a hack and a phony,
especially his Broadway snob co-star Mike (Norton) and his jittery
daughter/assistant Sam (Emma Stone, who enjoys a few remarkable scenes), but
his biggest critic is the film’s central critic, the New York Times theatre
reviewer named Tabitha (an effectively wry Lesley Duncan). Tabitha is a snobby
old battle-ax, an esoteric intellectual who believes that film actors and
theatre actors should never mingle and that Riggan’s work is inherently
inferior, although she herself has yet to see it. Birdman, however, shows theatre as the less-sophisticated of the
two art forms as it recreates the honesty and sense of ephemerality that exists
in live theatre, and it one-ups the power of a stage by giving the actors
conventional dramatic work, but then affording them extra dimensions,
especially Keaton, as the camera thrusts them into close-ups and they shatter
their character’ with an intimacy of emotion that simply cannot be registered
onstage. The film also knows the audience’s inherent boredom with using any art
form simply as a vehicle for storytelling as it evolves Riggan’s alter-ego
interludes as Birdman into breathtaking jolts in which zany explosions, wild
action, and the thrill of flying find the truth and comfort in Hollywood
escapism.
Birdman might be a
highly stylized flurry of form and mechanics—one can almost sense the amount of
work that goes into coordinating each frame of the film—yet the whole affair
feels like two hours of jazzy riffing. There’s a thrill of spontaneity and of
improvisation even though the film is so obviously orchestrated. One aspect
that helps is arguably the energetic drum score by Antonio Sanchez that ripples
in and out of the diegesis as it plays a role in the noise of the city streets
or as a maddening pulse for Riggan’s volatile psychology. Keaton himself
becomes unhinged as the drums reach their crescendo, and Birdman, like Riggan’s play, beats with experimentation and
reinvention. This jazzy film is a triumph of reinvention.
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is now playing in theatres from Fox Searchligh Pictures. It screens in
Ottawa at The ByTowne and Landmark Kanata.
