Michael Keaton gets his first starring role in many a moon playing Riggan Thomas, a 60-year-old has been actor whose glory days peaked twenty years before, thanks to an action movie franchise known as Birdman. Since that's all he's ever been known for, Riggan decides it's time to make a desperate (and costly) attempt to show himself as not only a serious actor, but also as a writer and director. He's staging a play based on a short story by Raymond Carver (who inspired him to become an actor), and Alejandro González Iñárritu's film is about his attempt to pull it off. Subtlety has never been Iñárritu's strong suit, which he proves again here, although he does hit some grace notes along the way.
Most of the movie takes place backstage at the theater, structured in a way for us to experience all the pressure and suffocation that Riggan and his fellow cast members go through as they prepare for the period from preview show to opening night. All the archetypes are covered: the pompous leading man (Edward Norton), the insecure actress (Naomi Watts), the actress Riggan is sleeping with (Andrea Riseborough), Riggan's fucked up daughter (Emma Stone), and of course, his long suffering yet sympathetic wife (Amy Ryan). I found most of the performances engrossing; the weak link is Zach Galifianakis, type cast as Riggan's nutty lawyer and best friend. But the others keep the movie afloat, especially Keaton, Norton, and Stone, who manages to breathe some depth and history into her stock character.
The screenplay is painfully overwritten. The characters criticize each other, lecture each other, and support each other in a series of speeches that try to make it very, very clear what the meaning of it all is, in case for some reason we missed it the first few times. One of the most cringe inducing moments comes when Riggan's daughter goes on a long rant about how nobody is important, followed closely by a run in Riggan has with a stuffy theater critic (Lindsay Duncan). Because it's all about self sacrifice and showing the world you still matter! Get it? And criticism exists to humiliate people who are out there trying to bear their souls! Get it? Oh yeah, I got it. Iñárritu makes certain I will not forget.
SPOILER ALERT
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki does a splendid job capturing the need to escape the narrow halls of backstage theater, and what a relief it is finally be on stage, where a whole new type of fear awaits. There are moments where Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is able to nicely convey these hardships as well, such as when a preview show is ruined by a drunken outburst, or when a couple making out above the stage transitions down into a live performance. I even was grateful for some of the quieter moments, like late in the picture when Riggan makes a confession to his ex-wife about the night he cheated on her or Norton's leading man trying to size up Riggan's daughter on the theater rooftop. But for every two of these, there are a half dozen more that force feed the nature of things to us. Even the shooting style, which is supposed to make the movie feel like one uninterrupted take, eventually wears thin, to the point we realize that by taking away the stylistic approach, you wouldn't be left with much.
As the events leading to opening night continue to spiral out of control, so does Riggan, and Iñárritu, who has tried to add touches of surrealism throughout, lets the fireworks fly during the final third. So, where the first two thirds of the movie beats everything into our heads through dialogue, the last part tries to make sure we understand what all the voices in Riggan's head have really stood for. It feels like a cheap thrill, a lackluster attempt for a filmmaker out of his element to show us how creative he can be. By that point, though, he'd already lost me, so by the time the movie reaches its inevitable conclusion, there's no sense of wonder left. Keaton is so good here, and the potential of this role is so rich that it's a shame to see it wasted on a bunch of overblown observations about being washed up. What could have been profound ended up, for me, as a series of shrugs.
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(c) Hell and Beyond, 2014
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