Movie Review: "Birdman" (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014)

TAILSPIN by Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Above: The specter of Birdman haunts Riggan (Michael Keaton) in Mr. Iñárritu's film

 

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie “Birdman” takes place in a Broadway theater—a maze of cramped, near-vertical passages and one extremely messy stage.  It’s where actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) has decided to engineer his rebirth.  Once, he was a washed-up superhero actor (best known for playing this film’s titular crime-fighter); now, if he can access some emotional truth and sheer luck, he just might be able to redeem himself in a dutifully serious play based on Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

            If you want to draw some meaning from this comedic backstage drama, you’d be better off working on the crew of an actual theater production.  “Birdman” may be meticulously crafted, but it’s also strangely muted—amusing when it means to be funny and indifferent when it tries to be touching.  I enjoyed much of the film but in the end, it felt more like a chore than a cinematic experience—a determinedly weird work that tries (and never quite manages) to express something about loss, fame, family, and the absurdity of art in any form. 

            Edward Norton is a different matter.  He plays Mike Shiner, a slick, temperamental method actor who joins the play just days before opening night.  This is the movie’s injection of necessary conflict—since the play is Riggan’s last chance at success, Mr. Iñárritu complicates it frantically by making Mike as psychotic as possible, turning him into a spindly, pompadoured fly in the ointment of Riggan’s misguided opus. 

            It’s thanks to Mr. Norton’s performance that “Birdman” bursts to life as often as it does.  “I pretend everywhere except onstage,” Mike confesses with rueful cool, but Mr. Norton’s performance belies that remark.  In Mike’s first scene, he stands erect, a neat porkpie hat (like the one he wore in “The Illusionist,” but gray) adding to his impeccable height.  But in more casual, rooftop conversations with Riggan’s daughter Sam (Emma Stone), Mr. Norton allows Mike to be slumped, and maybe even sincere. 

            Those chats have a quiet, almost theatrical nature.  And that’s a compliment, by the way; movies may be my preferred medium, but I still love the moment in every play when the applause dies away, leaving the actors to stand and speak their lines to a silent audience.  It’s when you (and hopefully they) get lost in the moment and “Birdman” wants you to get lost too.  Hence Mr. Iñárritu’s determination to strip away some of film’s poetic artifice by creating a movie that feels as if it were hectically captured by a documentary cameraman (the transcendentally talented cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot the entire film in long, jittery takes, providing a rough, fly-on-the- wall perspective).

            The vibrant realism of “Birdman” is crucial, because it heaves potently against the film’s lapses into semi-fantastical visions of Riggan floating, held aloft by invisible wires of hope and ego.  The problem is that while these images are memorable, Riggan himself is not.  He may talk fast, but what is he?  Just another washed-up celebrity who never spent enough time with his family.  In other words, he embodies the increasingly tired cliché of the worn-out superstar, an archetype that can only be enlivened by the two things that “Birdman” lacks—the fascinatingly ludicrous depravity of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and the clear, seeping emotion of “Lost in Translation.”

            Does that mean that you shouldn’t see “Birdman”?  Not necessarily.  To Mr. Iñárritu’s credit, he’s made a fully-formed, creatively uncompromising work.  And whether or not viewers embrace it will say as much about them as it will about this undeniably provocative filmmaker (who memorably shredded the 2006 Oscar season with his uneven and jarring global drama “Babel”). 

Yet the nastily surreal finale of “Birdman” suggests what I probably should have suspected all along—that Mr. Iñárritu’s film is a stiffly engineered art piece, rather than a lived-in, need-to-tell-the-world story.  In the end, like Riggan, Mr. Iñárritu doesn’t know how to talk about love.