The film follows Riggan Thomson, a washed-up actor whose
main achievement was playing a superhero in a film series called Birdman. Now Thomson is making his
triple-threat Broadway debut, directing and starring in a play he adapted from
the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
Thomson is fraught with self-doubt and plagued by the voice of Birdman, who
picks at him relentlessly at times, criticizing his every move and urging him
to rekindle the Birdman flames by
doing yet another sequel. This constant inner-critic may be quite real,
especially for actors, and the movie suggests that every character in Birdman who is an actor is plagued by
some sort of constant, nagging, demeaning voice inside. What’s more, Riggan Thomson
himself is endowed with actual superpowers. He can move objects with his
mind—Carrie-style—and he can even fly. Well, it’s never clear if these are really
super-powers or if Thomson is simply hallucinating like Russell Crowe’s
character in A Beautiful Mind,
but to the film’s credit, it
allows this mystery to stay mysterious.
The director of Birdman
is Alejandro Iñárritu, whose previous credits include the Brad
Pitt-everything-is-connected drama Babel
(2006) and the awards darling Biutiful
(2010). Iñárritu
seems to enjoy putting people together who are ready to tear into each other
and then stepping back and letting the sparks and wigs fly. (This is theater after
all, and everyone is always on one side or the other of hair and make-up.) Iñárritu
is fascinated by the inner-workings of the theater, and he obviously thinks we are
too. But his fascination begins and ends with the pet neuroses of his characters,
the actors. The non-actor characters in Birdman
(except for Emma Stone’s character) are basically invisible. Actors acting is
the main attraction, put on display like a sideshow attraction at a traveling
circus. It’s like watching the autopsy of a play, or more likely, the autopsy
of the art of performance. It feels all the more “behind-the-scenes-ish”
because of the camera, which treats Birdman
like a documentary.
Birdman feels
fluid and alive because the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity), is fond of shooting in long
takes and letting the camera move around the set like a person. Most of the
film takes place inside an old New York City theater, and the camera travels
its narrow halls and invades it little claustrophobic rooms—as well as the main
stage—like a nosy bystander recording every scene with a cell phone.
Lubezki’s camera-work gives Birdman a
certain visual style that has the ability to “wow” audiences because it’s very
different from what they’re used to. And the movie bounches with energy as a
result, even though that energy isn’t particularly organic. As interesting as
the camera-work is, it feels like the movie’s chief gimmick, a hollow, obvious
attempt to avoid feeling too stagey, too theatrical.
That’s the real issue I have with Birdman. Its many gimmicks don’t add up to anything substantive. There
are lots of scenes of actors playing actors acting. And there are lots of
scenes of actors playing actors having meltdowns or panic attacks. Iñárritu
has identified all the well-known idiosyncrasies of artists who are terrified
of failure and success, and who can
never believe in their own talent. Naomi Watts, playing one of the stars of
Thomson’s forthcoming play, has a moment when she realizes with utter
disillusionment that she’s finally made it to Broadway and that the experience,
one which she dreamed about most of her life, isn’t as satisfying as she’d
imagined it. Or rather, it’s hugely crushing and ambiguous because it’s a giant
success that’s riddled with frustrations and smaller disappointments. She longs
to be validated by Riggan, who himself is seeking validation too. Watts is
good, but there’s very little in her character beyond “self-obsessed neurotic
actress,” which might easily have been written into the stage notes introducing
her character if Birdman were an
actual play.
There’s little dimension to most of these characters. Most
of them are emotional wrecks, and the two characters who are supposedly the
most dysfunctional are actually the most stable. One, played by Edward Norton,
is a notoriously unpredictable theater actor named Mike Shiner, and the other,
played by Emma Stone, is Riggan’s daughter, Sam, a recovering junkie. I could
never quite buy her as a wreck because she seemed so much more together than
the rest of the group. And Norton’s character, who shocks his co-stars by
taking big risks on the stage, turns out to be the film’s voice of reason. He
shouldn’t be, because he’s a jerk, but Iñárritu always allows him to make
more sense than anyone else right after he’s done something to justifiably
enrage them. He too is a kind of gimmick in this movie. The first time we see
him, he strips down naked without a hint of shyness so the costume designer can
fit him. He’s not afraid of being naked on the stage, you see. He’s a real
actor who’s already done the work of feeling comfortable within himself and
with his body. Fear of nakedness—physical or emotional—is for naïfs. Later,
during a bed scene in the play, he tries to get Naomi Watts’s character to actually sleep with him, to make it more real.
There is too much shouty, dramatic acting in Birdman and too much excessive neurosis.
The movie is self-important, and maybe too aware of the fact that it has so
much “going for it” in a sense. It does have a fine cast and parts that any
actor would covet. Plus, it gets to play the literary game by referencing
Raymond Carver, darling of the creative writing circuit, in almost every scene. But
the Carver obsession feels self-indulgent. (Although that might just be my
aversion to his writing.) The Raymond Carver we get in Birdman feels like straight Tennessee Williams: spare, ultra-male
middle-class dysfunction, a less-bewitching, more economic version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
But, there are worse things than Birdman. It’s fascinating at times, and the drum score by Antonio
Sanchez is pretty fantastic. It’s the most energizing thing about this movie.
With Zach Galifianakis, who’s quite good as a prissy, anxious producer; Amy
Ryan, as Thomson’s ex-wife and the calmest figure in the movie, Andrea
Riseboroguh, Merritt Wever, and Lindsay Duncan.
