Riggan Thomson has been through personal and career ups and downs since hanging up his winged cape a couple of decades previously and is trying to revive both aspects of his life with an ambitious Broadway production of a Raymond Carver short story which he's adapted, directs and stars in.
Onstage drama isn't enough, of course, so his current girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) is in the cast and his recently out of rehab daughter (Emma Stone) is his personal assistant. The female lead (Naomi Watts) seems stable until the addition of her talented but arrogant boyfriend (Ed Norton) to the play highlights the fault lines in everybody's personalities. But hey, what a cast. And that's without mentioning Zach Galifianakis who suits this smarter, cerebral style of comedy far more than the gross-out crap he usually associates himself with.
Did I mention Riggan is pestered by an inner monologue which has the voice of and eventually takes the physical form of his old superhero character? Well he does, so clearly he's not entirely well in the brain place.
Norton's compelling but brutal approach to the play ensures the uptake for preview shows is full but another spectral figure haunts Riggan, one other people can see: an influential old bag of a reviewer (Lindsay Duncan). She hates the play without even seeing it because for her it represents everything that is wrong with modern theatre - untrained screen celebrities taking up hallowed stages with vanity projects in a bid to prove they are serious actors.
Is that what Riggan's doing? His personal Birdman critic berates him for the same reasons so somewhere inside he must fear that these are his motives. Norton's insistence on reality within the piece urges Keaton further and further away from cosy notions of a small stage success but also possibly further away from sanity.
Iñárittu makes the movie look like it's one long continuous shot, adding to its theatricality and immediacy but the trick wouldn't work without powerful performances from all. While Naomi Watts seems somewhat underused and thus more of a cypher than a character her commitment to the role even manages to turn that into a reflection of theatre land. Norton is as confusingly full of rage and underlying impotence as he is in all his great performances from American History X to Fight Club.
Emma Stone is the woman of the moment. Well her and Jennifer Lawrence but Emma can actually act. Like Watts she manages to paint a relatively small canvas with huge brush strokes and conjure up possibly the finest work I've seen her do (no, I haven't yet seen La La Land. Shut up, already!)
If the other characters become scenery to Keaton's internal and externalised struggles both within himself and with the play it is because it's his film. Are any of them playing people who were once internationally famous as Birdman? No, they're not, so it isn't about them, much as they might antagonise, frustrate, encourage or otherwise impact upon his ambitions.
I think I recall an interview with Keaton from around the turn of the century where he admitted that Batman had killed his career for a while because it meant directors and audiences alike forgot that he is actually a skilled character actor. He's evidently way beyond that stage now if he was more than happy by 2014 to nod to his own past career and its effect in this. What he gives us is a nuanced, tragicomic, heartbreakingly realistic portrayal of a man searching for some kind of personal meaning within a world that still sees him not as whoever he might imagine himself to be but as a superhero they once paid the entry price to see in movie screens up and down the land.
By turns both subtle and blatantly emotive, Birdman is also one of Iñárittu's finest films, something rightly acknowledged at the 87th Academy where it won four Oscars, one of which was for best director. I can't figure it why I haven't watched it before. I know I'll watch it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment