The casting for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is perfect for a film focused on the porous line between reality and fantasy. Michael Keaton, who played Batman decades ago for Tim Burton, stars as Riggan Thomson, a faded superhero trying for a comeback through the side door of high culture. Producing, directing and starring in his own theatrical adaptation of a Raymond Carver story, Thomson is trying to amass credibility capital in a bid to re-launch his career. But the dream of Broadway success becomes an anxious nightmare as every aspect of his plan goes awry.
Like Keaton, Thomson walked away from a cash-cow franchise whose blockbusters opened doors for a legion of caped and masked anti-heroes. Thomson is having trouble separating himself from his old role: We meet him levitating above the floor of his ratty Broadway dressing room, a superhero in his underwear with receding hair, wrinkled skin and a kink in his neck. The basso profundo voice of his character, Birdman, taunts him. The beaked, winged superhero is surly, demanding: “How did we end up here? This place is horrible.”
Birdman is skeptical over staging a Carver short story as a mid-20th-century adult psychodrama of tragedy and broken dreams. As Thomson’s alter ego, Birdman articulates the actor’s fear of failure as the project whirls out of control even as the dramaturgy mirrors his own life. Thomson mortgaged everything on a production that has begun to bleed money before the first preview.
In the background of Thomson’s delusions are the artificial worlds of film and theater, where truth becomes the material for falsehood in pursuit of truth writ large. Among Thomson’s antagonists is an avatar of an old assumption—of theater’s superiority over the vulgar upstart medium of movies. Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) is a respected stage actor deep into Method, feeling and living every moment on stage but an impotent fraud elsewhere in life. “Feed me a line,” he tells Thomson confidently. He doesn’t need the script, knows more than the director and challenges him for control of the stage, mocking his movies while invoking his pet status with the New York Times’ theater critic, Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan). Penning her reviews at the far end of a bar, Tabitha is cold and cerebral, hateful of Hollywood junk culture and determined to wield her power to close Thomson’s play with a bad review.
Thomson challenges Tabitha for labeling reality rather than engaging it, for mistaking the “tiny noises” in her head for knowledge, for constructing a worldview from comparisons with comparisons. She is unmoved, standing in opposition to the bubblehead entertainment writers who have flocked to the production to cover the “aging ex-superhero.” Tabitha is to them as Shiner is to Thomson. Both sides of the coin are threatened by the new currency of social media.
Emma Stone plays an important supporting role as Thomson’s daughter, Sam. Just out of rehab, she works as dad’s incapable personal assistant and is a bundle of snarling rage stemming from the comfortably furnished neglect of her childhood. Sam is Thomson’s harshest critic. “You’re scared to death like the rest of us that you don’t matter,” she shouts. “You’re not important! Get over it!” And when a video of dad goes viral—the one where he’s trapped outside the theater’s locked stage door and runs for cover in his underwear—she is proud of the old man. That’s what matters nowadays, not art, but what’s trending.
Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has come a long way from gritty if clever Mexican independent films to a grand cinematic production that shatters barriers between drama and comedy, realism and fantasy, personal and social. Much of Birdman is filmed in long unbroken takes through the dark winding labyrinth of backstage Broadway and into the bright stage lights. Heckled by the intelligentsia and pestered by old fans seeking autographs, Thomson can never escape his past. Birdman finally materializes in full costume as the film turns into a city-leveling blockbuster. “Apocalyptic porn—that’s what people want,” Birdman proclaims. “It saves people from their boring, miserable lives. They love action.”
As Thomson stumbles in alcoholic oblivion, we are left to wonder whether Sam is right in calling dad’s embrace of the art of drama as just another exercise in ego and self-absorption. And what about the crazy street performer declaiming Shakespeare to no one? Is it all “Sound and fury signifying nothing”? Keaton, Norton and Stone are superb, slipping between intense psychological states in a world without center or much reason to go on except the pursuit of a dream.
