2014 drama, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Keaton, Zach
Galifianakis; IMDb /
allmovie. Back in the day,
Riggan Thompson played the hero in the Birdman films; now he's putting
on a Broadway play in a bid to be taken seriously for his art.
There are two separate films here. One is the technical gimmickry
of making the film appear to be all one shot: there are no cuts. There
were two problems with that for me: the first was I know enough about
video editing to realise that if you've got even a single frame with
nothing moving in it (even more so if there are no people in it) it's
not hard to cut there, set up the shot again on a different day, and
edit over the inevitable minor differences, and there are so many of
those obvious cut points that I end up being unimpressed with the
technical wizardry.
The second point, and I think the more serious one, is that it isn't
in service to the story. The dramatic unities aren't respected; we
have a shot of Riggan preparing to be interviewed, pan round to the
other side of his dressing-room and there the interviewers are. We
sometimes leave Riggan to follow other characters. There are
fast-forwards in time. In other words, all the usual editing tricks
have been reinvented for this new way of presenting a film; I'd have
been more impressed if we had been constantly following Riggan,
without the breaks for other people or the fast forwards, through two
hours of his own subjective experience.
And it's a shame that such a fuss gets made about the "one shot"
presentation, because apart from that the film gets quite
interesting, trying to look at the tension between commercial success
and the respect of your peers. (The film critic who promises to give
the play a negative review whatever it's like, simply because Riggan
is a Hollywood celebrity who thinks he can act, may be the true
heroine of the piece. And in the end, though the play will be a
success, it'll be because it's that guy who blew his nose off on
stage, not because the actual thing is any good.)
It's also a very subjective film: there's no way, I think, to work out
from what's shown here what may have happened in consensus reality,
except that Riggan is certainly experiencing hallucinations, and one
sequence is clearly inspired by nightmare. Which makes the
deliberately ambiguous ending feel like a bit of a cop-out: what do
you think happens to round off the story? Whatever you like.
There's a great cast, though only Keaton gets much character
development. I suspect the multiple Academy Award wins were for (a)
being "about" acting, thereby stroking the ego of the Academy voters,
and (b) being "clever" rather than trying to appeal to the mass
market. I don't love it, but I may well come back and watch it again
in a few years.
Once more if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.