Wow, what a strange, intense movie. Birdman, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, directed by Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu, is nearly 2 hours, and the the drama is turned up to 11 from beginning to end. Riggan, played by Michael Keaton, is a washed up actor whose high point was the last “Birdman” superhero movie in 1992 (the same year Keaton did his last Batman movie…coincidence?). He is trying to get his game back with a Broadway production of a high drama play. The distinction between reality and fantasy in Riggan is loose. When nobody else is in the room, he can levitate things and is haunted by the speech and image of Birdman. His actors are hyper-engaged, temperamental and always in a state of high drama themselves. When one of them is severely injured by a falling light (levitation?…accident?), “Mike” (Ed Norton) arrives on the set. He’s having an affair with another cast member, Leslie (Naomi Watts) and already knows his lines in a play that has not been performed yet, even though he often ignores them.
In spite of preview disasters, injuries and a horny actor (Norton) who actually wants to have live sex on stage, the play progresses toward its opening, which is already damned by an influential critic who has not even seen the play but hates it anyway. Money is short, the producer (Zach Galifianakis) is frantic and everything that can go wrong goes wrong. What’s amazing in this movie is that it is SO intensely dramatic and exhaustingly fasctinating. Keaton is on screen for about 95% of the movie, and really does NOT look good, nor do any of the other actors. They are at their ragged, frantic worst. Will this play come off? Will anybody survive? Can Riggan really fly?
This movie strains your boundaries; you are never sure what is real and what is not and when you think that the strange things are Riggan’s fantasies, then you recall that the light really DID hit the actor in the early scene. In the small realm of movies about creating live theater, the last one I saw was Me and Orson Welles, a completely enjoyable tale of a kid getting his first taste of theater under the shadow of Welles. Birdman is no Me and Orson Welles. Characters are intense, unattractive, often much more dramatic off stage than on, nothing works right and everybody is at their edge. I also recall the kind of polarized reaction of audiences to Mallick’s The Tree of Life, which is probably similar to the reaction to this movie. I really enjoyed it, but then I am the sort of right side of the brain person that also liked The Tree of Life. Birdman is much more linear and does have a story, but its loose sense of what is real is similarly disjointing in a story that is so up-close and low-tech. The entire cast is excellent, and all spend the entire movie in overdrive and mostly being unattractive. Keaton is especially amazing, with his unflattering portrayal of this character. The entire movie is also filmed in near extreme close-up, with shaky, unnerving camera work, claustrophobic, cluttered sets, mostly in the backstage area of a Broadway theater. It’s also a great New York movie, capturing the messy, confusing back alleys of Midtown, the crazy mob scene of Times Square and the hunt for celebrities. It is not a movie for the faint of heart, nor the easily offended. It’s a wild ride to a strange ending.
