Birdman

Birdman (15)

USA 2014  119 mins  Dir: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu  Starring: Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Lindsay Duncan

After his brilliant debut Amores Perros, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s career charted a steady downward trajectory, exhausting the fractured narrative trick and eventually reaching its nadir with the dreary Biutiful, which strained for ‘meaningfulness’ beyond its grasp. Thankfully, the formally dazzling if somewhat cluttered Birdman reverses the trend. It also adds a welcome dash of black humour, which has hitherto been absent from Inarritu’s often ponderous work.

The film boasts a hint of those self-indulgent, self-referential comedies in which Hollywood laughs fondly at itself to show what a good sport it is – with verbal swipes at everyone from Robert Downey Jr to, erm, Justin Bieber – and offers clued-in audiences the opportunity to congratulate themselves for getting all the high and low culture references. But there’s also sufficient venom directed at critics, over-indulged actors, social media and the idiot public to keep cosiness at bay. Former Batman Michael Keaton is cast knowingly as Riggan Thomson, former star of the Birdman blockbuster superhero franchise, who bailed after Birdman 3 in pursuit of credibility by adapting, directing and starring in a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s What We Think About When We Think About Love. A hint of what he’s up against comes in an early, acutely observed press round table scene with an airhead celebrity hackette (“Is it true that you’ve been injecting semen from baby pigs?”), an intense Barthes-quoting cine-snob, and an Asian chap who over-excitedly misinterprets a reply as meaning that Thomson has signed on for Birdman 4.

Needless to say, it’s all turned to shit before the first preview. The leading man has been incapacitated in a mysterious accident, so neurotic female lead Lesley (Watts) drafts in her superstar thespian boyfriend, Mike Shiner (Norton). This does wonders for the advance box office, but Shiner is a demanding, self-important, method-acting, tantrum-prone nightmare, who seems likely to sabotage the whole thing before the curtain goes up. To add to Thomson’s woes, his girlfriend (Riseborough) announces that she may be pregnant and his sulky, fresh-from-rehab daughter (Stone), whom he has unwisely taken on as an assistant, swiftly develops a carnal interest in Shiner. As if all that wasn’t enough, the sarcastic voice of Birdman squawks constantly inside our dishevelled and harassed hero’s head, belittling him for being a “lame, pathetic, bitter cocksucker” and “a sad, selfish, mediocre actor grasping at the last vestiges of his career.”

Brilliant Gravity cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki’s camera prowls through the theatre and out into Times Square, most memorably for a sequence in which Keaton finds himself running through the streets in his underwear, giving the illusion that the film consists of a single, lengthy take, a la Hitchcock’s Rope (or Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark, if you prefer a beard-stroking arthouse bar cineaste comparison). Keaton inhabits the lead role with all the commitment of a washed-up star desperate to be taken seriously (lest we forget, no one went to see his downbeat directorial debut, The Merry Gentlemen), while Ed Norton sends himself up gamely. In a scene that crackles with energy, Lindsay Duncan pops up as the sneering, acid-tongued barfly queen of New York theatre critics, telling Thomson he’s “a Hollywood clown in a lycra bird suit” who doesn’t belong on Broadway and vowing to shut down his play without even seeing it. This is such an enjoyable turn that it seems a shame to spoil it by wondering whether critics still really wield such power.

Pitched somewhere between Bullets Over Broadway and Synechdoche, New York, Birdman stays in the air thanks to its pitch-black comedy even as Inarritu begins to weigh it down it with fantasy sequences that threaten to impinge on tiresome Michel Gondry territory and concludes on one of his soggy ‘spiritual’ notes. Still, the visual gag of the camera panning past the soundtrack musicians – in this case a solitary drummer performing Antonio Sanchez’s jittery improvised score – remains just as entertaining as when Mel Brooks first did it.