Film Review - Birdman

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Spoiler alerts - 2014 I really loved this movie, subtitled The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance, and starring Michael Keaton as a washed up superhero actor trying to carve a new start as a serious Broadway theatre actor-director. The Birdman stuff echoes Keaton’s Batman stories and foreshadows his Spiderman role as The Vulture, (Spiderman actually appears on the stage in a late surreal fantasy sequence among various other characters). Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (who also did the ultra-bleak Amorres Perez and Babel) lightens up here with a sharp, often bitingly funny script. It feels at time like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, though it has underlying themes of despair, mid-life crisis, and depression too. The real star is the camera, as the film creates a sense of mostly being shot in one take, despite multiple locations and complex changes of character relationship. It is quite beautiful watching the camera sweep from one scene to the next through corridors and onto rooftops or through doorways. There is purposeful ambiguity as to whether or not Keaton’s Riggan character actually has Birdman Super-powers. He has telekinetic rages that vandalize his property but when anyone walks in on him he is demolishing his stuff by hand. When a dull actor annoys him during an early rehearsal for the Raymond Carver stage adaptation he is doing, a lighting rig knocks the man unconscious. Riggan take credit for it. Later, after hearing the Birdman voice, he is visibly followed by his most famous character, (played by Benjamin Kanes), and he enjoys a fantasy flight, complete with explosions, robots and a Godzilla-like monster, before landing outside the theatre but he is chased into the building by an irate taxi-driver who wants him to pay the fare, indicating that the whole sequence was played out in Riggan’s head. Later, after failing to kill himself live on stage, only literally cutting off his nose to spite his face instead, he leaps out the hospital window to join the birds. His daughter (Emma Stone) walks in, looks down out of the window but seems to see nothing. She looks up and starts to laugh, but we don’t see what she laughs at. Edward Norton is also great as the monumentally egotistical stage production co-star, Mike Shiner, a total male Diva who drinks real gin on stage rather than imitating it with water, and during the adultery scene, tries to actually make love to the leading actress live on stage rather than pretending. The daughter sees how her father’s moments of embarrassment can further his career. She creates a Twitter account for him that he never sees but hears from her how many followers he attracts, especially after he ends up accidentally walking round the theatre block in his underwear and again, after he shoots his nose off trying to kill himself. He is left feeling more defined by his moments of ignorance and stupidity than for his greater achievements. A very talky often quite sweary film, but beautifully scripted and with some of the most amazing camera work ever. Arthur Chappell