Birdman – directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Dramedy. 119 minutes Color 2014
★★★
The Story A one-time movie star rehearses for a comeback in a Broadway play, and various calamities ensue.
~
It’s a maze with no center. So one’s fun in it leaches away, as this dawns on one. And we become bruised by the way the story fails in its loyalty to us. For what we have, instead of a tale of something, is pigtails that octopus out on all sides and seize on nothing. We have the main actor and we have his stage competitor and this actor’s live-in lady and the main actor’s former wife and the main actor’s present mistress and the main actor’s grown daughter and the main actor’s best friend, and we have a play cobbled together from fiction by Raymond Carver, and we have a vengeful theatre critic. And the main story so trails off into unnecessary and thin expositions of these personages that it loses any coherence or any sense that there is a main story and a principal concern for us to latch onto. What’s at stake? Is it Will the show go on? Is it Will he get back his wife? Is it Will he commit suicide?
A possible story might have been: can the main character act? That is to say, Can he act brilliantly? The best acted scene is one in which he must come alive when a replacement actor brings it to brief vivid life. Edward Norton plays this replacement, and Norton is an actor in full command of his instrument. But the main character?
So the story might be: Can the main actor act just as brilliantly on opening night? That might be the story, but it doesn’t seem to be, for the success of the opening night performance depends upon a fluke that has nothing do to with acting. Besides, the main actor is played by Michael Keaton, and he is up to his old bagful of tricks and tics and twitches. So since we see Keaton is not a great actor himself, we never know what we are supposed to think about the acting of the character he is playing or how we are supposed to respond to him. The result is we never identify with the character. It’s a failure of treatment on the part of the director. Even the play he is in looks like a bad play, but one isn’t sure. Besides, we as an audience want a story to follow. We are filched of it.
We are also given scenes extravagantly unnecessary. For example, the film begins with Keaton meditating in his dressing room in full levitation, so we know he can fly; we don’t need this shown again until the end. On the other hand, we have scenes missing. The character Edward Norton plays is sidetracked cheaply into a dubious relationship with the daughter, and dropped from the story cold. We are left with the marble quarry of Michael Keaton’s charm. It becomes colder the more the director pays attention to it.
Norton is very good in his part, and so is Zach Galifianakis as the friend, and Lindsey Duncan as the deadly critic. The picture is shot so fluidly that it brings pleasure even to the missing pleasure of the film as a whole. We are given lots of narration but no story. Lots of icecream but no cone to carry it in.
At the end, there was no ovation. Everyone stood. To exit. Defeated.