Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 11, 2014 1:37 pm 
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MICHAEL KEATON IN BIRDMAN

Everything and more, in single takes

His space opera Gravity turns out not to have been Iñárritu's most technically challenging project with his whiz dp Emmanuel Lubezki, who again uses flowing virtuoso single-shot tricks he first learned filming Children of Men. No, the greater feat would be Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance), whose whirlwind tour-de-force structure follows a cast-off comic book movie superstar (a motormouthed Michael Keaton) all around a Broadway theater where he is attempting to mount a vanity project that's to be a comeback and assertion of his literary seriousness and acting chops. It's a theatrical adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story, "What We Talk Abut When We Talk About Love." Hold your breath. There's lots more.

The trick? There are many. First of all the film is made to look shot in a single take, with the camera following Riggan Thomson (Keaton) seamlessly all around the long narrow corridors and nooks and crannies of the the complicated theater, up to its roof, even out into the crowds of Times Square and beyond. The main musical accompaniment, which is nearly incessant, is drums. And there's crazy stuff going on. Riggan can float in the air, and he has powers of teleportation, though he hides these from others or maybe just imagines he has them. Also when others are not around, he is guided/plagued by a deep-resonant-voiced alter ego (actually Keaton's own voice, delivered at a booming lower register). With the long takes and the hyperbolic, apoplectic dialogues between Riggin and himself and each of three women in his life -- Lesley (Naomi Watts), Laura (Andrea Riseborough) and Sam (Emma Stone), all on the scene; his absurdly "method" costar in the play Mike Shiner (Edward Norton); his sycophantic producer (comic Zach Galifianakis, in mostly serious mode); even a key Broadway critic, Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) who vows to "kill" his play -- Birdman never, ever stops for breath.

The effect is exhilarating if a bit exhausting, and the feel is unlike any other movie, though for some reason I was reminded of Leos Carax's transcendently weird Holy Motors (NYFF 2012). This isn't as original as Carax's film: its messages about love and being true to yourself and avoiding media frenzy are too easily summarized. But it, like Holy Motors, is a "trip" movie, spinning out continual surprises and about personal transformation and the magic of cinema, the wonder of playacting. The scene where Riggin gets locked outside the theater and walks through Times Square in his skivvies feels right out of Carax's film, and Keaton's current gnarly transformable face is not unlike Carax's muse Denis Lavant's.

While Gravity had little complexity in terms of human life stories and moral issues, Birdman, feeding on its literary inspiration Raymond Carver's human depth, does nothing but go over and over themes of career backlash, addiction and recovery, guilt and responsibility, Hollywood vs. legitimate stage, superman roles vs. serious acting, and career choices -- notably Riggin's long ago (like Keaton's own to play Burton's Batman) to play a high-flying "bird" superhero that's Icarus-like (though the pretension of the mythical analogy is mocked), a role that leads average folks to recognize him on the street and ask for fan photos and autographs. The irony is that he's a has-been, but he's loved.

Needless to say this is a Norma Desmond-like role for Keaton, who's playing an actor whose dilemma is not unlike his own, of never quite having gotten beyond the decades-ago Faustian bargain of taking on a big comic book superhero role that made him famous and, in sequels, made him big bucks, but then made it hard for him to get serious parts thereafter, or, when he got them, to be taken seriously in them. Against this theme is that of how Broadway nowadays keeps using movie stars to draw in the tourist audience and make money, and the serious theatrical fans' contempt for this current practice. And yes, Iñárritu and his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink cowriters Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Armando Bo also insist on making much of social media and the younger generation whose concept of fame is "going viral." But if such editorializing is obvious, contemporary references to Michael Fassbender, Robert Downey Jr. and Jeremy Renner, not to mention Justin Bieber and Roland Barthes, add to the smart contemporary satire. If this were all a play (though it's too cinematic to to be just that), it might be a reasonably complex and clever one.

Riggin has not only written his play adaptation of Carver's story (which in the event we don't see all that much of) but is directing it and starring in it, with a bathetic speech to bring down the house before intermission and blowing his brains out just before curtain time at the end. The movie plays around with reality and illusion from the first scene, where Riggin is meditating in a yoga pose floating in the air in his dressing room. It also plays with "acting" vs. "feeling." Riggin stages an accident to eliminate a costar he doesn't think worthy and in comes Shiner (Norton), who mysteriously kows all the lines, and also insists on rewrites. Some line reading moments are so strange we don't know if the actors are improvising, or just very good, or it's not a play at all. The play previews are disasters the public seems to like.

The single-take format focused on Riggin is readymade for a portrait of egocentrism: the movie literally revolves around its star. There may be desperation in Riggin's behavior, and absurd overconfidence in Shiner's, but both Keaton and Norton are wonderfully at ease. It's a pleasure to see them play off each other, and everybody in the cast seems to be enjoying the tight restriction of the shooting methods, which required that everything follow a strict predetermined plan as to movement, lighting, camera placement, etc.

In the circumstances, the women are somewhat slighted. For the play, Riggin has chosen to use a respected old friend (Naomi Watts) and a much younger actress he's having sex with (Andrea Riseborough); their moments with him, as the film's whirlwind whirls, are relatively brief, and their intensity doesn't register over the intensity of everything else. Daughter Sam, just out of rehab, is a somewhat cliched figure, and Stone, tattooed and scrawny, is intentionally less engaging than usual. Nonetheless Sam has better moments than the two older women and is allowed to be both her father's friend and his most outspoken critic -- other than the newspaper critic Tabitha, who plans to pan him for no other reason than that he is in her view just a "celebrity" and not a real actor. Needless to say, Keaton disproves this.

Whether all this is digestible is a good question, but Iñárritu & Co. have delivered a quite marvelous and original package nonetheless, moving into something unified, witty, and lively that relates more to the early parts of Amores Perros than to what Variety's Peter Debruge harshly called the "phony, contrived melodramas" that were the Mexican director's 21 Grams, Babel and Biutiful. I too was unmoved by those overwrought efforts, and thought Gravity overrated, a fiilm that wasted its spellbinding setup. Birdman is overwrought too, but pleasingly different and wild fun.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance), 119 mins., debuted at Venice, in other festivals, and from festival reviews it has a Metacritic rating of 90%. It made a fittingly virtuosic end as the closing night film of the 52nd New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review. US theatrical release is a week later (limited), 17 October. Other countries have release dates in early 2015.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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