I’m still trying to wrap my head around this surreal bit of brilliance. Michael Keaton’s performance in Birdman is blazing.
In one of the purest cases of art imitating life, this stunning film casts former action hero Batman Michael Keaton as a former action hero “Birdman” movie star Riggan Thompson. Like his character, Keaton seemed to have dropped off the big screen for the past decade, and in both metaphorical and literal senses Birdman is his comeback as a leading man. A resounding, unforgettable, Oscar-contender comeback!
Directed by Babel‘s Alejandro Iñarritu, with taut camerawork by Gravity‘s Oscar-winner Emmanuel Lubezki, the film defies easy categorization. A mannered—at times surreal—black comedy of backstage egos, psychodrama, and promiscuity, the film follows the three final days of theatrical rehearsals and previews before Thompson’s opening night on Broadway. Starring in a play he wrote and directed, Thompson is an engaging mass of anxieties. His daughter (Emma Stone) fresh out of rehab is working in the theater and loaded with attitude. His co-star (Edward Norton) is gunning for top billing. Various current and former mistresses, as well as an ex-wife, continue to plague his last grasp at self-worth. Throw into this mix a stalwart producer buddy (Zach Galifianakis) and a caustic New York theater critic (Lindsey Duncan) determined to destroy his new show and you have every stereotype needed to explore the thorny jungle of theater.
Whether we get to be the hero of our own life, or whether we simply play that part, is what Birdman explores. Each actor is wonderful, and each portrays a character rife with anger (much of it smart and funny). Stone delivers a few searing gems of filial rage and in the process reminds her father that his so-called career doesn’t matter anymore. Norton is perfection as an actor who only exists when he’s onstage. His performance anxiety occurs only in real-life sexual situations. And of course the point is that we are all only performing our lives.
As opening night approaches, Riggan pushes up against his own blackest doubts, plagued by an inner voice of conscience (or alter ego) embodied by the same “Birdman” he played in movies. I won’t spoil anything by revealing how this magic realism works. Riggan gets drunk one night and confronts the critic. In a sobering soliloquy, she tells him why she wants to destroy him and his play. All you actors, you big movie stars, think you can simply come here and become overnight successes in real theater. You’re a bunch of selfish children, she continues. I hate you all. Delicious!
Keaton’s character rages right back that as a critic she isn’t entitled to judge real artists. She’s nothing. She creates nothing.
Well you get the idea. I practically stopped breathing listening to each explosive duet of rage and Schadenfreude catch fire.
The ensemble is seamless, but Birdman is Keaton’s film. His face registering every nuance, every color of pain, exhaustion, hope, disappointment and delirious happiness, Keaton is a mysterious joy to watch. His smiles illuminate places we can scarcely identify. His despairing face can just as suddenly dissolve into ruins. Keaton, long famed as a comic, has been good in the past. In the hands of this director he is adventurous, raw and revelatory. We can’t help believing that we’re witnessing the actor’s own fears and redemption in Riggan’s mercurial ups and downs, all happening in three days of real time action thanks to the creative editing into what appears to be a single long cinematic shot.
Go see Birdman. It will inhabit your consciousness for a long long time.
