The theater’s lights lowered. I sunk into my seat. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) was about to begin, but something was askew. There was a light flooding my vision. I panicked – the theater was not fully darkened. It shined from the passageway leading to the exit door below the screen. Suddenly, I was perspiring with frustration. I wanted to grab a manager, but the movie had started. I breathed, waited, and watched. By the time Birdman had concluded, my angered, dotting sweat had transformed into a full-blown athletic pour, and the pestering exit door light had transformed into an escape route.
Set within the confines of a New York theater space, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film has the feel of a maddened chamber piece, an existential blender with blades fashioned from jagged, rusted angst. Its main player is Riggan Thomson (the phenomenally nutty Michael Keaton), a celebrity actor of the superhero strain who, after ditching his rubber Birdman outfit, has now faded into obscurity. Searching for that final fit of significance, he takes on the daunting task of adapting, directing, and starring in a Broadway version of the Raymond Carver novel “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
As the play’s debut approaches on stage incidents and backstage dramatics begin to sink Riggan’s pursuit. From his daughter-assistant Sam (Emma Stone) who is fresh out of rehab and hungry for her absent father’s attention to the play’s new supporting actor Mike Shiner (a scene-stealing Edward Norton), a pretentious Broadway stalwart bent on method-realism, Thomson watches as the tension of life and work tears apart his existence. His occasional breaks from the madness invoke odd flights of magical-realist fancy. These are the only times he seems to have control: flying, moving objects with his mind, and levitating.
Director Iñárritu and brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s single-take illusion pervades the film. As if Thomson’s own mental crisis had been incarnated, the camera winds through backstage corridors like a neurotic bird salvaging scraps of emotional debris from every broken relationship and tense meeting within the theater, furiously creating a nest of chaotic anxiety. Maybe it’s the haunting figure of Riggan’s past, Birdman, guiding the camera. After all, it is Birdman who constantly follows the desperate actor throughout the film, a projection of his psyche savagely calling him to return to his mediocre yet prosperous fame, creating a vitriolic storm within Riggan.
By the film’s end Riggan is completely poured out. After all this grueling work, he confesses, “I am nothing. I am not even here.” Iñárritu underlines this theme of meaning lost by often having characters peer upward, but he makes the choice to leave the audience blind to what exists above the frame. So, as I watched Keaton, I couldn’t help but notice the wrinkles on his face, his pursed mouth framed by a goatee greyed and wiry. His physical presenceis like painted-on strain. Keaton’s own world-weariness plays like a life lived always trying to see what is above the frame. What lies behind these attempts for meaning?
Riggan’s search is summed up in the image of a fiery object falling from the sky which frames the film. I’m not sure if it’s a glorious descent or a doomed plummet, but whatever it may be, Iñárritu left me wondering if Riggan truly found the love he sought. I sure hope he did.
While getting ready to leave the theater, Birdman’s wrenching angst defied me and caused me to strain my eyes toward that persistent exit light. Riggan, trapped within his own spiraling breakdown and in the mechanism of Lubezki’s camera, did not have the luxury of such an exit. But I do, and I am reminded that despite life’s bruising anguish, I have the choice to exit into a world where I exist and am beloved.
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