MOVIE REVIEW
“Birdman”
Grade: A
Starring Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone and Naomi Watts. Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu.
Rated R for profanity, sex, violence, adult themes. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 59 minutes.
Bottom line: An out-of-the-blue masterwork that ranks as one of the best films
By Steven Rea
The Philadelphia Inquirer
At the beginning of “Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)”, Michael Keaton’s brooding, jittery Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood star faded from view, is in the lotus position, in his underpants, meditating. In his own mind at least (and isn’t that what meditation is all about?), he is doing transcendent stuff.
But maybe it’s not just in his mind.
Like its cross-legged protagonist — famous way-back-when as the titular superhero of a blockbuster franchise and now trying to reclaim his career, his legitimacy, and his soul by staging his adaptation of a Raymond Carver story on Broadway — “Birdman” operates on a whole other plane of existence. It is exhilarating moviemaking, an out-of-the-blue masterwork that ranks as one of the best films of not just the year, but the decade, the century.
Sure, that sounds like hyperbole. But Alejandro G. Inarritu’s fierce, funny, breathless dive into the head of a man in deep trouble will set audiences talking, debating, wobbling with awe.
Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, who won this year’s Oscar for his similarly sinuous cinematography in “Gravity,” and scripted by Inarritu with cohorts Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Armando Bo, “Birdman” is backstage melodrama, a farce in a death mask.
Keaton, who did his time in cape and cowl for Tim Burton’s “Batman” and “Batman Returns,” gives a performance drawn from personal and professional experience, but also from the dark, scary recesses of his psyche.
An all-powerful theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) dismisses Riggan as “a Hollywood clown in a Lycra birdsuit.” She is manifestly hostile to his grand endeavor to mount his version of Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” on the proscenium of the St. James Theater. But Riggan has mortgaged his Malibu house, poured his savings into the show, and has brought his daughter, Sam (an awesomely edgy Emma Stone), into the bargain, thinking that having her as his personal assistant will bring them closer. (Wrong, Dad!)
Joining Riggan onstage in the two-couple drama are the noble thespians played by Andrea Riseborough and Naomi Watts, with Edward Norton in the role of Mike Shiner, a man of the theater whose determination to find the “truth” in a character, a play, has made him both revered and reviled.
Even the visual effects in “Birdman” — a superhero conflagration, with exploding helicopters and an otherworldly monster — are better than what you get in “Spider-Man” or “The Avengers.” With its improvisatory score (drummer Antonio Sanchez provides a hustling backbeat throughout), its seamless shots, its leaps into the surreal, and then back again into the excruciating, embarrassing real, “Birdman” ascends to the greatest of heights.
It’s a heady view up there, wherever “there” is.
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