REVIEW: Birdman (Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance Or Whatever)(2015)

Acting is tough, so very, very tough. It is even worse if you don’t believe in what you are doing, y’know. Because no one wants to be popular, popularity is for the sell-outs. What everyone wants and what we all strive for is prestige, isn’t it. Or is it the ability to disappear in a role, to take on someone else’s problems and escape your own, but to find something within yourself while you are this other person, this character, that will help you become a fuller, better person in real life, whatever that is. But this constant search, this struggle, to find your true self is what acting is all about. Or is it just a relentless rat race to get the next big role, to stay on everyone’s minds at all times, to be seen as the best, to have everyone know your name and know that you are indeed a genius. So, anyway, acting is tough, whether you approach it as a constant search for self-fulfilment or self-definition or just for plain old Truth. Or filthy lucre. Either way its tough as hell.

There are few films about acting that don’t trouble their audiences with unbridled narcissism and dew-eyed sentimentality about the trials of this career choice and of the apparently low return and inevitable, heartbreaking decline in popularity. Chaplin’s Limelight is the kind of film that you want to strangle, and Birdman is not really all that much better. It is still a film that sentimentalises a job that most people wouldn’t consider particularly difficult – taxing, yes, but hardly coalmining – and it is amply rewarded, indeed often ridiculously so. It is also another film about acting in which the protagonist is played by an actor that would invite the audience to identify a certain truth behind the film. In this case, Birdman as played by Riggan as played by Michael Keaton is obviously (indeed too obvious for it to be deemed particularly clever) Batman. And the film is another one of those ones in which an actor loses popularity and so strives for prestige. Riggan is mounting a production of Raymond Carver in an effort to gain instant prestige, but the film isn’t really interested in addressing the cynical idea that certain performances can invite instant popularity and instant prestige and others nothing regardless of the quality of the actual performance. Why do Raymond Carver if it is all about prestige and why should Raymond Carver work as a passport to prestige if that is all it is used for? Is art really art if self-interest is at the heart of it? Does the true artist care about his public persona (I use the masculine because this stupid film insists that true artists are exclusively men – women here stand aside in awe or invent pregnancies) or does he create art because he thinks the public will dig it? The film doesn’t say.

Birdman doesn’t say anything about anything. It is the kind of film that pokes at interesting and profound ideas, but doesn’t have the patience to look at them properly. It points out that superhero films have taken over, but leaves it at that as if that particular insight is unique and groundbreaking enough. It suggests that this is what a modern, cinema-going audience wants, and says no more (and in fact ignores the ascent of television – too risky perhaps). It shows real sexism and even an attempted rape, and wonders if it has anything to do with the creation of real and true art, but prefers to move on (the film is CGI-ed to look like one long take, which is nicely done but noticeably fake and does not allow the film to ever slow down and think). It gestures at emotions, but it seems to be bored by them, and watching the film, it is difficult to care about anything or anyone that wanders in front of the camera as it completes its little technological innovation.

Birdman is a film without a point, a masquerade of intelligence and witty remarks without an ounce of intellectual or emotional weight. There is one nice scene in which Mike (Edward Norton) shows Riggan how to act a scene, which shows how two actors might have fun with a scene as written, getting into and around every line on the page and even making some of it up to find something real behind all the nice words and lines. It is the only scene in the film that is any fun, and the only one that suggests something positive and creative. And yet the camera will soon move on almost immediately to more self-pitying and more sexism. The film, by the way, does not refer to or acknowledge the fact that film is incredibly male-centric so the sexism isn’t intentional and it isn’t pointed.

The film is messy and it likes to roam around, so there didn’t seem to be any point in reviewing it soberly and mathematically, but the criticisms stand. The film is ultimately boring, because after so much whingeing and so much pretension, there isn’t anything in it worth staying for. It is the kind of film that adds little and takes away a lot, particularly when one considers that there are things here that it could have addressed, that could have made it worth making and worth watching, if only Iñárritu and his three other screenwriters had the balls. In that regard, it isn’t too far away from The Theory of Everything and that’s pretty damning for a film so self-consciously innovative.

See also:

Biutiful

REVIEW: Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Woody Allen does not read the reviews of his films. Some people think he should, but I think it is a good thing. Only a film director utterly unaware of the ‘narrative’ other people are making up for him – early funny ones, great middle period, the grim Bergman period (totally underappreciated), the lazy later ones and the recent return to form (which seems to have happened at least three times) – would have a confidence to release films so set in their own unique ways as You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and To Rome With Love either side of something as crowd-pleasing as Midnight in Paris. Some of Woody Allen’s best films are simple elaborations on themes already tackled elsewhere – the grim but brilliant Another Woman and the carefree musical Everyone Says I Love You share the same plot point. That said, Allen’s new film, Magic in the Moonlight, will most likely play like an unintentional gift to his more negative critics – evidence for their (incorrect) assertion that he is simply not trying anymore. Magic in the Moonlight is indeed wafer-thin, light entertainment, but does it suggest that Allen isn’t that bothered?

Colin Firth plays Stanley, a magician who spends his free time exposing fraudulent psychics. Invited by his old friend Howard (Simon McBurney) to the south of France, where a rich family are besotted with a new psychic Sophie (Emma Stone), whose tricks even Howard cannot figure out. Stanley agrees, but after meeting Sophie, he cannot uncover her secrets or explain how she does it. He begins to wonder if there really is something supernatural about her and, hence, about the world.

Magic in the Moonlight then is about a moody and outspoken atheist who is suddenly faced with something that science cannot explain. Stanley cannot sleep at night such is his fear of a meaningless existence and when Sophie’s abilities start to break down his (dis)beliefs, he is first sceptical and then overjoyed. Firth is good here, overwhelmed by joy and excitement – as we all would if we suddenly found proof of the possibility of an afterlife. The twist ending is both totally expected and yet mildly disappointing, like waking out of a cheery dream.

Beyond that, there is disappointingly little to Magic in the Moonlight. The film is full of conversations about atheism and faith, as if the film needs to establish the stakes of this dilemma that we have all surely gone through at one point or another. Most of the dialogue is heavy on exposition – there is a lot of explaining for a film as slight as this. Some scenes wander badly while some of the snappy scenes are not nearly snappy enough. Sometimes it feels like something Noel Coward wrote in the early-1940s, which isn’t a particularly good thing. The film feels stretched at 97 minutes – already a bit on the long side for a Woody Allen film – considering that a film as deep and rich as Another Woman was twenty minutes shorter. There are some jokes about Nietzsche but they aren’t good ones – there is no sense here that Allen has even read Nietzsche. In fact there are very few jokes, a lot less than the plot would suggest and a lot less than can be expected of Allen.

Taken as light entertainment, the film is fine. It is entertaining and it is diverting, but only in the way of a TV movie scheduled in the middle of a lazy, rainy afternoon. The cinema feels like the wrong venue for this film, since the cinema encourages more attention and focus than this film can sustain. It is decent, but it is wholly disposable in a way that other supposedly disposable Allen films were not. The ending is so uncertain and rushed it feels like an awkward shrug. It is probably the first Allen film to feel as if it was made only to sustain his one-film-a-year record. So, a bit dull, not awful but not nearly funny enough either, reasonably likable when it is playing. Though you can’t help but wonder what some first-time writer-director would do with these actors, this budget and this idea.

See also:

Blue Jasmine