Alejandro González Iñárritu (2014)
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films to date haven’t been notable for their humour. Birdman is a (black) comedy but its subtitle predicts self-importance (and the irritating placing of ‘or’ before the opening bracket hints at calculated eccentricity). Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is a washed-up Hollywood star. He once played the superhero Birdman. He turned his back on this commercially colossal movie franchise and saw his career plummet. Twenty years later, Riggan is trying to relaunch himself – this time, as a serious artist: he’s adapted Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for the stage. The play, which Riggan stars in and is also directing, is about to open on Broadway. Birdman is remarkable chiefly for a piece of technical ingenuity: nearly the whole film appears to be one continuous long take – even though the camera moves between interiors and exteriors and the story extends over several days. This device is more than clever trompe l’oeil on the part of Iñárritu, his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and his editors, Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione. Once you realise what the film-makers are about, the effect of the long take is increasingly claustrophobic, and causes one to share something of the protagonist’s feelings of imprisonment. Riggan is still publicly and inescapably regarded as Birdman. He repeatedly hears the superhero’s voice, usually deriding Riggan’s attempts to establish a new artistic identity, in his head. An acidly contemptuous theatre critic, Tabitha Dickinson, reminds him that he’s ‘a celebrity, not an actor’. The essential inseparability of the world inside the theatre and the one outside it on the streets of New York is realised most strongly in a sequence in which Riggan, taking a cigarette break and getting a breath of fresh air between scenes at a preview performance of the play, finds himself locked outside a stage door that’s banged shut. He has to remove his robe, jammed in the door, and walk in his underpants through Times Square in order to get back inside in the theatre. He arrives on cue to deliver his next line, his appearance amusing and delighting the front stalls just as it did the passers-by and autograph hunters outside.
Another, presumably less intended, effect of the single take is an increasing sense of the contrivance of Birdman; the acting in it, expert and almost entirely unsurprising, reinforces this effect. Richard Brody’s critique[1] is mostly right about what’s wrong with the film. The typography of the opening titles brought to my mind, like Brody’s, the words on the screen at the start of Pierrot le fou: this pinch didn’t make me (unlike him) feel that Iñárritu was getting ‘in the ring’ with Jean-Luc Godard but Brody is right that, by casting Michael Keaton in the lead in Birdman, Iñárritu ‘fuses the viewer’s knowledge of the performer’s previous roles (and, for that matter, life) with the character that the actor plays’. Keaton’s movie career has never – until now – recovered from his decision not to play Batman a third time. His combination of barely suppressed mania and dry wit made his characterisation of Bruce Wayne unusually interesting. The same qualities are evident in his portrait of Riggan Thomson: Keaton’s controlled interior power is often expressive; he makes Riggan more likeable than virtually all the other main characters in Birdman put together; but I don’t believe he would be receiving the prizes that are now coming his way if he hadn’t played Batman. The cast also includes Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Zach Galifianakis and Lindsay Duncan: on the rare occasions when the script supplies these actors with the opportunity to show a different side they take it (this is particularly so in the closing stages of a scene in which the Norton and Stone characters play a game of truth or dare, and in a dressing-room conversation that Ryan, as his ex-wife, has with Riggan). But the performances, accomplished as they are, are mostly one-note – reflecting the relentlessly snippy dialogue that the main players in Riggan’s life and production exchange.
This technically sophisticated film, complete with ear-catching soundtrack (a selection of emotive classical tracks and a complementary drum-roll accompaniment by Antonio Sanchez), seems state of the art but its people and satirical targets are very familiar. There’s the faded star identified with a role from which he yearns to break free. There’s the lethal collision between this character’s onstage and offstage predicaments (shades of Ronald Colman in A Double Life). There’s the brilliant, impossible method actor (Norton), whose determination to deliver a performance that’s ‘truthful’ makes him, for example, insist on drinking gin rather than water when his character in the play is meant to be drinking gin, and on trying to persuade his real-life girlfriend Lesley (Watts) to have real sex when the people they’re playing are making love onstage. Actors are caricatured as desperately promiscuous and insecure egotists: as the preview audiences applaud them, the players on stage bow and smile and abuse each other sotto voce. ‘Why have I no self-esteem?’ moans Lesley. ‘But you’re an actress, darling’, replies her co-star Laura (Riseborough). There’s the critic (Duncan), who can single-handedly make or break a Broadway play and is destructively determined to kill this one.
In the event, Riggan, whose Carver character shoots himself at the end of the play, fires a real bullet into his own head on the production’s first night and Tabitha Dickinson writes a review (with the headline ‘The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance’), which hails Riggan’s achievement of a new ‘super-realism’ in American theatre. I don’t agree with Richard Brody that the players in Birdman fail to distinguish the style of their acting in the play-within-the-film vs their characterisations of the actors performing the play but Brody is right that Birdman seeks to confirm the superiority of stage acting to movie acting (it’s an irony that the differentiated playing of Keaton, Norton, Watts and Riseborough in Riggan’s play suggests otherwise) – and the corrupting effect of Hollywood. When Riggan is looking for a replacement actor, he suggests Woody Harrelson, then Michael Fassbender, then Robert Downey Jr and is told by his friend and producer (Galifianakis) that they’re otherwise engaged on the next in the series of Hunger Games, X-Men and Iron Man respectively. (As Anthony Lane points out, also in the New Yorker, it’s another in-joke that Mike Shiner, the actor whom Riggan does recruit, is played by Edward Norton, who played, just the once, the Incredible Hulk.) Riggan’s attempt at suicide succeeds only in blowing off his nose. The doctors soon surgically replace it. A nose job – it’s a confirmation that Riggan Thomson is a creature of the movies.
There’s no reason why these durable clichés can’t be entertaining once again but there’s no indication either that Iñárritu and his co-writers on the screenplay (Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Armando Bo) recognise them as clichés: they’re presented rather as if fresh and searing insights. The whole film is percolated by obviousness: as soon as Riggan is shown to possess some of the supernatural talents of his erstwhile big screen alter ego (levitation, telekinesis), it’s clear that he will, in due course, be airborne too. What appears to be his maiden flight is revealed to be fantasy. (This sequence is emotionally effective – both in providing, albeit within the continuous long take, a sense of release and in bringing the viewer down to earth with the realisation of the fantasy.) But the unqualified implication of the film’s last scene is that the hero really has reverted to being a superhero. Alejandro González Iñárritu does plenty of smart things in Birdman but they’re seldom enjoyable. Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Stone), shows him an exercise she was taught as part of a recent spell in rehab: you indicate by a single mark, on sheet after sheet of a roll of tissue, every ten thousand years the universe has existed; a single sheet represents the totality of human life on Earth. Sam passes the sheet to her father, who, a little later in their conversation, inadvertently wipes his nose on it and, as his daughter says, wipes out human history. A couple of scenes on, a desperate, drunken Riggan shows Tabitha Dickinson the cherished scrap of paper which decided him, as a teenager, on an acting career and explains his choice of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as the project that will establish him as a creative artist. Raymond Carver happened to be in the audience for a school production in which Riggan appeared and sent him a note of thanks for ‘an honest performance’. Riggan leaves the bar, after getting nowhere with the unyielding Tabitha. He also leaves the Carver note there, with the scrunched up notes for a review which Riggan tore from Tabitha’s pad. This moment chimes with the life-on-Earth toilet paper; you recognise Iñárritu’s cleverness (and may even congratulate yourself on picking this up). Yet the discarding of the Carver note doesn’t chime with Riggan’s character so the resonance rings hollow. For all its surface dynamism and modernity, Birdman is mouldy. It’s a doubly lowering experience – thanks both to its pessimism and to its being lauded as one of the films of the year.
29 December 2014
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/birdman-never-achieves-flight
