Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

I am prepared to be one of the lone dissenting voices on Birdman’s inevitable domination come awards season. Just looking at the critical consensus at Rotten Tomatoes means I am in the 7% who did not find the movie “an ambitious technical showcase powered by a layered story.”

No, I found Birdman to be contemptuous of its audience, assaulting their intelligence and talking down to them in loudly delivered bullet points without much development or original thought behind them. It hides behind this well-traveled and overly familiar terrain with two fantastic leading performances, a great under-utilized one, and virtuosity that is frequently more distracting than it is awe-inspiring.

Made to look like one continuous take, Birdman tells the story of an actor on the brink of being completely forgotten taking a stab at a revitalization by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production of a Raymond Carver short story. The premise is strong, but then Alejandro González Iñárritu makes a series of decisions that are questionable at best. I have long been only mildly impressed with his work, but Birdman may have firmly tipped me into actively disliking him. But more on that later.

Where Birdman is very strong is in the central performance from Michael Keaton. I may have disliked the film, but I am completely enamored with his strong work here. Granted, casting him as a potentially washed up actor most known for his superhero films at first feels like a bit of cheap stunt casting, but Keaton’s always been an underrated talent and he creates something more interesting and vital with his performance here. One of Keaton’s great strengths as an actor, and it is indulged here, is his ability to project paranoia and a manic energy into his characters. His best creations always feel like they’re slowly dancing upon the edge of sanity and pure madness, and that works like gangbusters here. It may be too soon to call a likely candidate to sweep Best Actor, but I just really loved Keaton’s work enough to hope it makes it to the podium come Oscar night.

The other two performances that I quite enjoyed were Edward Norton as a primadonna actor and Emma Stone as Keaton’s drug addict daughter/assistant, I hope both of them will be nominated in the supporting categories at this year’s Oscar ceremony. Norton gets the bigger role, and he plays it for all the crazed, darkly comic pathos that is available. Stone, somewhat wasted in an underwritten role, makes a notable impression with what little she has been given to do. I wanted more from her here.

But that’s about all of the praise I have for Birdman. The rest is a serious of loud sloganeering delivered as if it was kind of deep philosophical thought on the state of art in America. And a theater critic is a badly written artifice, a creation of purely malevolence intent that only wants to see Keaton fail for no real reason other than he’s a Hollywood actor who dares to go to Broadway. Birdman’s got some strange ideas, antiquated ones, about what constitutes true art and what is only pretending. A more serious discussion would have been much preferable to various characters talking AT the critic. Instead from the moment she is introduced we are aware that unless some kind of miracle happens, she’s going to pan the show.

But this juvenile approach to artistic criticism, a true necessity if one is to grow in any way, shape or form, as simply “haters gon’ hate” isn’t the worst of the film’s problems. Worse yet is the fast and loose treatment of magic realism. Much of the film details fantastical flights of imagination that are revealed to have only been the thoughts of Keaton’s slowly crumbling actor. That is, until we get to the very last moments of the film in which is suddenly wants to tell us that all of those flights of fancy are true. This is despite the film undercutting them every time previously. I don’t mind a film making me question whether or not the magic was real, as long as it plays fair with the rules created within its world. Pan’s Labyrinth and Black Swan both played fair, Birdman was more interesting when those fantasies were the products of a person’s mental collapse.

As for Alejandro González Iñárritu? To play devil’s advocate, I have not seen Biutiful, but I have seen 21 Grams and Babel. I found both of them to be films of strange choices that undercut the material. 21 Grams decision to needlessly convolute the timeline destroyed any mounting dread or emotional involvement, reducing the drama to series of depressing tableaus that would have been much better if delivered straight. While Babel was another Crash, but this time on a global scale. Everything is connected, glamorous movie stars suffering, everything wrapped up in Academy-friendly packaging and nothing much of interest to say. Thank god, they went with The Departed that year instead. This film is just the latest his self-serious, didactic oeuvre. He has grand ambition, but he can’t seem to find the correct tone or pitch in any of these. Yet the finished product still feels intellectually smug and pretentious. Thanks be to Keaton for being a combustible element in this wet blanket.