Semi-fresh from shooting smash hit, Gravity, Alejandro González Iñárritu brings us Birdman: a film hell-bent on bettering last year’s visual ambition. This is an exciting prospect indeed, but in a movie oozing performance energy and character complexity, Iñárritu’s tunnel vision mission doesn’t quite do his actors and material much justice.
Iñárritu’s flick focuses on fading superhero actor, Riggan Thompson (played by a manic Michael Keaton) desperate to “make something meaningful” on Broadway. It’s a classic aging actor paradox, and, from the outset, an interesting concept for a character study. However, the problem with Birdman is that its neglected screenplay sets flight in so many directions that it falls flat on its face along the way. This is movie that’s messy, maddening and draped in visual distraction.
The film is penned as a ‘black comedy’ but, in reality, it’s a sort of meandering melodrama. The setting screams satire: cinema’s superhero craze, theatre mechanics, aging actors, Broadway darlings… But all of these comedic gold mines are only ever chipped into at best. It’s as if Iñárritu seems concerned solely with drawing as much attention as possible to his audacious cinematography, which, let’s face it, if it were as good as it thinks it is, wouldn’t require the endless look-at-me treatment; it would naturally work, enchant and amaze.
The camerawork is unique for sure, but Iñárritu essentially has no perception of the concept of technical brevity, leaving the film feeling excessive and exhausting. It’s in-your-face loud, and everyone involved is either angry, angrily circling the angry actors’ faces, or angrily tapping on hi-hats and cymbals at increasingly unnecessary times.
Between Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone and co., some of the performances here are fantastic. The trouble is that they’re completely, utterly wasted in an underwritten, overshot world. There are a handful of genuinely great moments in the film (from fist-fights to lofty one-liners) but, for the most part, these guys bicker their way through narrative obscurity and visual gimmickry for what is apparently only two hours, not four (Birdman’s biggest and most astonishing secret).
It’s the sort of film that leaves you feeling that these actors, playing as these characters, could’ve created something really special under a more focused director and a decent screenplay. You can almost smell them itching for more. Long before the curtain fell, I felt like storming onto Riggan Thompson’s theatre set and telling these guys to pack up and go home.