Put a bird on it

Birdman’s credits list four writers—director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dienlaris and Armando Bo—but it feels like the work of a single mind, just as it seems to be composed of one long seamless shot, the camera swerving and darting to catch details any other movie would cut away from.

By the same token, while Birdman teems with characters as much as any movie set in New York (and backstage at a Broadway play), and while some of those characters are drawn in sharp, definitive strokes, the only one we really know intimately is Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton)—and if anything, that’s a little too intimate. We can’t throw up our hands and leave the dressing room, or the stage, or the bar, the way the other characters do when Riggan’s obsessions drive them to it—characters like his best friend/lawyer/producer Jake (Zach Galifianakis), or his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) or ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan). Sometimes it feels like we’re as trapped inside Riggan’s head as he is. Our consolation, and part of what makes Birdman such a wild ride, is that Riggan is no more comfortable in there than we are.

Riggan’s obsession is his last-ditch effort to salvage his career. Twenty years ago he starred as Birdman in three comic-book superhero movies, blockbusters that have defined him ever since; people accost him for photos and autographs though he’s long since washed his hands of the franchise. Now he’s washed up and desperate to prove himself by directing and starring on Broadway in his own adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Almost everyone—maybe even Riggan himself—expects the play to flop.

Certainly the production seems to be in trouble. When the other actor in the four-character play is put out of commission by a falling lighting instrument, Riggan confides to Jake that it was no accident: “I made it happen.” We see Riggan destroying objects with Birdman’s super-powers—but whenever anyone else enters the shot, we see only Riggan trashing his dressing room. We see Riggan flying to rehearsal, swooping among the Gotham skyscrapers—then a cabbie chases him through the doors of the theater shouting, “Sir! Sir! You forgot to pay me!” We hear the voice, and sometimes see the presence, of Birdman himself, alternately encouraging and taunting Riggan (the voice is Keaton’s; the presence is an unbilled actor named Benjamin Kanes). No doubt about it, Riggan Thomson is losing his grip.

Things don’t improve when Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) arrives to replace the fallen actor. Mike is one of the hottest actors in the business right now; when Riggan’s co-star Lesley (Naomi Watts) suggests him, Riggan and Jake wonder how she can bring him aboard (“We share a vagina,” she explains). But Mike also turns out to be a total pain in the ass, an arrogant prima donna who scoffs at Hollywood stars and their “cultural genocide” but insists on his own tanning bed in his dressing room, who wants to get drunk on real gin on stage and wants Riggan to point a real gun at him because the prop gun isn’t threatening enough. This simmering clash makes a shambles of the show’s preview performances; combined with Riggan’s love-guilt-and-resentment relationship with daughter Sam, it threatens to send him over the edge, and to take us with him.

Whether it does or not is one of Birdman’s tantalizing ambiguities; sloshing around in a madman’s mind means we’re never sure what’s happening and what isn’t. The sheer brilliance of Iñ&#;aacute;rritu’s technique fills us with stunned admiration, even as the messy state of Riggan’s head and Keaton’s taut pugnacity inspire shock and awe.

I was reminded of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. Not only because of the has-been-nut-case-movie-star theme, but because poor Gloria Swanson, after giving the most brilliant performance of her career, spent the rest of her life trying to convince people she wasn’t really Norma Desmond. Now Michael Keaton, with the performance of his life, faces 30 years of insisting to people that he’s not really Riggan Thomson. Did he not think that one through, or did he figure it was worth it?