Saturday, November 8, 2014

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Surprisingly funny and intense as all get out, this story of an angry, desperate, hallucinating, ex-action hero mounting a serious play on Broadway is a flat-out masterpiece. Jack said Michael Keaton's layered performance was one of the best he's ever seen. There's a certain symmetry to the choice of Keaton (last blogged in Robocop) for this role of Riggan Thomson, as Keaton played Batman in 1989 and 1992. My friend Judy worked on the movie One Good Cop (1991) and happened to be present for the first table-read of the script. She told me that each person introduced him-/herself. When it was Keaton's turn, he gruffly said, "I'm Batman," and the room cracked up.

That funny man should get an Oscar nomination for this role. He's already been nominated for a Gotham Award, and the movie for Best Film, plus four wins and a Golden Lion nomination at the Venice Film Festival. It's early yet.

Ed Norton (most recently in these pages in The Grand Budapest Hotel) and Zach Galifianakis (last in The Campaign, and last in a serious role in It's Kind of a Funny Story) also bring magnificent work to their high-energy characters: the mercurial and brilliant actor Mike and the hard-working, take-no-prisoners lawyer Jake, respectively.

I don't want to discount the women in this cast. Emma Stone (most recently in Magic in the Moonlight) is wonderful as Riggan's troubled daughter Sam, Naomi Watts (just in St. Vincent) great as insecure actress Lesley, Andrea Riseborough (last in Disconnect) very good as Riggan's girlfriend and co-star Laura, and Amy Ryan (was in Clear History with Keaton) grounded as the sanest person in the movie, Riggan's ex-wife and Sam's mother, Sylvia. That covers the seven faces on the poster, but I must mention Lindsay Duncan (Le Week-End) whose few scenes as a feared critic are important.

It's such a cliché to say that New York City is a character in the story, but even so, this couldn't take place anywhere else. In fact, it's narrowed down to the St. James Theatre on West 44 Street, where we saw Bullets Over Broadway earlier this year, and the block where it's located.

Director Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu (last in these pages in Biutiful) co-wrote the script with Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bo, who both collaborated with the director on Biutiful, and Alexander Dinelaris in his debut. The cinematographer responsible for the moody pictures is Emmanuel Lubezki (Oscar nominated for A Little Princess (1995), Sleepy Hollow (1999), The New World (2005), Children of Men (2006), and The Tree of Life, and winner for Gravity). Apparently Iñárritu told Mike Nichols he was planning to shoot the entire movie in one long camera shot but Nichols advised against it, saying it would decrease the chance for editing in some comic timing. Nonetheless, the movie appears to be made that way, and I do advise those afflicted with Motion Picture Motion Sickness (MPMS) to sit in the back and bring your ginger or remedy of choice to counteract the constant use of hand-held cameras.

There are songs, but most of the soundtrack is drum solos, improvised by Antonio Sanchez, whose other job is drummer for the Pat Metheny Group. It is remarkable. Here's a Vanity Fair article about the score. No spoilers in the article but possibly one in the video. The album, with 15 drum tracks and six classical ones, can be previewed in its entirety here. In the very first moments of the movie, you'll hear someone speaking Spanish. That is Sanchez. The drummer you see on the screen in the movie is not.

Here's Rotten Tomatoes agreeing with us at 94% critics and 89 audiences, but it's been out only three weeks in limited release. This weekend's grosses obviously aren't posted yet, but by last weekend, when it was showing in 231 theatres, it was still number 12 in earnings. You won't regret adding to that total.

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