4 Mezmerizing-technical-directorial-and-acting-successes out of 4
Birdman opens with former Hollywood superstar Riggan Thomson levitating in a room in New York City. He’s in his underwear – a fashion statement we’ll see him repeat later in the film – and he’s grappling with a laundry list of personal and public demons. Riggan’s trying to stage a theatrical adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story; he’s written the script and spent a significant chunk of his personal time and finances acting and directing the play. Everyone thinks the play is going to be a failure, but Riggan is convinced that this is what his soul – and career – needs.
Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman is a beautiful film about people going nowhere, stuck in their own nihilistic circles of hell. It’s a movie about the beauty of pointlessness, and the script – written by Inarritu, as well as Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo – paints a portrait of perfectly damaged people. Every speaking role is given to a specific kind of twisted monster, and each character wrestles with disorders that range from addiction to insignificance.
To say that Inarritu’s characters are subversions of theatrical and cinematic tropes is too weak a dissection. To say that Inarritu’s film challenges modern notions of cinema is too hackneyed an analysis. The truth is, Birdman is an attack campaign against actors, producers, artists, critics, and audiences. We are, all of us, at fault for the state of our society, culture, cinema, theatre, art, and life. This is, of course, too simple an examination of Inarritu’s efforts.
What is Birdman, then? If it’s not a movie meant to raise our collective spirits – or crush our collective souls – what does Birdman hope to accomplish? On a purely technical level, Birdman seeks to prove that minimalism is a beautiful artistic style.
Inarritu shoots the entire film as one extended long-take tracking shot. Characters walk through scenes, enter and exit doorways, stop to chat and drink, fly, climb buildings, ride in cabs, and attempt suicide, while Inarritu captures every moment with a total of maybe six outstanding cuts. Aided by Emmanuel Lubezki’s lighting and cinematography, a single frame of Birdman is realistic and sublimely minimal. Music by Antonio Sanchez adds to Birdman‘s minimalism. Drums permeate much of the film’s scenes, while occasional classical music fills the spaces in-between.
Thematically, Birdman is a dark, dreary, depressing film that has the audacity to masquerade as a comedy. Audiences will laugh – but only because Inarritu’s film forces laughter out of its viewer’s lungs. Comedy in Birdman is used as an antidote – a remedy – to a long-ailing darkness growing in our fatigued minds.
What of Birdman‘s actors? Michael Keaton leads the film as Riggan Thomson; astute readers – those particularly tuned to universal ironies – will remark on the notion that Michael Keaton’s last major cinematic role was as Bruce Wayne in 1992’s Batman Returns. Astute readers will also note that Edward Norton – a terrific, multidimensional actor known to be extraordinarily difficult onset – plays an arrogant, self-absorbed theatre legend. This is a film that doesn’t require enormous imagination on the part of its cast; every actor – with the exception of Emma Stone in an incredible performance – plays some convoluted, deformed version of their selves captured by the media.
Birdman left me feeling weak and vulnerable. It hurt my feelings, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. In a heart-breaking scene, the slowly deteriorating Riggan attacks a needlessly cruel theatre critic. He claims that all she does is put labels to the works of others. The critic doesn’t understand what it’s like to put her life on the line in service to her art – all she does is write down adjectives to describe art. Michael Keaton’s anger and pain – nouns, thankfully – are felt through Inarritu’s camera, which insists on staring into his face. At that moment, we are all the critic being told that our understanding of art can never tear apart the dedication and merciless devotion of the painter to his canvas.
Ultimately, Birdman is about a broken shell of man, struggling to pull himself out of a nihilistic pit of self-imposed despair and exile. Played by Keaton – an acting legend who just hasn’t caught a break in years – we feel what it’s like to put everything on the line, only to have it slip out of our fingers.