Michael Keaton has a Dark Knight of the soul in this career-defining, genre-defying superhero film
We’ve seen the long-take trick before, perhaps most notably in Hitchcock’s 1948 chamber thriller Rope, which masked five of its 10 cuts by slinking in close to its cast. But in Birdman, the effect’s entirely different. Working with the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu turns the film into a high-wire act – live, unpredictable, light as air, yet also fatalistically locked on course. While it’s going on, you’re glued to the impossibility of what you’re seeing. Once it’s over, you can’t believe what you saw.
Yet Birdman isn’t a piece of empty showmanship. It’s a piece about empty showmanship, and its unhinged premise – a fairground-mirror image of the career of its leading man, who starred in Tim Burton’s two mega-grossing Batman films then quit the franchise on principle – couldn’t have been told in a smarter way.
Birdman is a film about the seductions of fame and prestige
But as the show crunches through its disastrous previews and towards opening night, reality springs a leak. In floods the psychological turmoil of the Carver story and also blockbuster carnage: giant, robotic crows peck at skyscrapers, while military aircraft strafe the Broadway crowds.
And hovering over it all is the spectre of Birdman himself – normally invisible, but sometimes glimpsed in his beaked mask and feathered cape – dripping poison in Riggan’s ear, like a malevolent Jiminy Cricket.
Riggan’s mania is fuelled by the seductions of fame and prestige, and how the two are, ultimately, nothing alike: “You’re not an actor, you’re a celebrity,” sneers Lindsay Duncan’s toxic theatre critic when Riggan buttonholes her after a disastrous preview night. But it’s also a film about faces, and the way in which all of us start to crumble the moment our masks drop.
There’s a scene in which Riggan’s fresh-from-rehab daughter (a superb Emma Stone) punctures her father’s pretensions with a monologue that’s delivered like a knitting needle to the gut. But while the words are furious, it’s the involuntary wince of sadness that flashes across her features in the silence that follows that makes us feel their point.
Keaton gives, in at least two senses, the performance of his career. He summons up all the manic comic energy of his early work in films like Night Shift and Beetlejuice, but Riggan seems half-fried by it, and as the heat increases on all sides, you can almost smell the sizzle. And he could hardly be better supported: Edward Norton is uproarious as his preening, co-star; Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough perfect as actresses jangled by insecurities; Zach Galifianakis tamped-down and terse as Riggan’s bumptious producer; Stone tremendous as the lone voice of reason, faltering and defiant.
This is grand, spectacular, star-powered cinema – a cosmological blockbuster – that makes us ask again what cinema can do and be. Call it a Dark Knight of the soul.
Birdman is released in the UK on January 1 2015
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