Birdman
Hello “Don’t take what I say seriously readers” your normal
correspondent has graciously allowed me to step in a present a guest review so
without further ado
Birdman: Or the Unexpected Virtues of Ignorance
When I first heard about this movie my initial thought was
that Birdman from Cash Money Millionaires, wait Billionaires, had made a movie
about his career as a rap mogul. Boy I
am glad that I was way off base.
Instead of being a crass ode to materialism from the
originator of the phrase “bling, bling”
Birdman was an exquisite study of aging, family, and the role of art.
In the interest of full disclosure, I saw this movie as the
lone patron of an arty theatre on a Wednesday night in Duluth Minnesota. A theater by the way that offered a full bar
of tasty locals brews to those lucky enough to find this cinematic Valhalla in
the basement of what looked to be a abandoned brick factory. So my review may come off as unnecessarily
fawning perhaps even giddy. Rest
assured I am not an Inarritu fan boy, I hated 21 grams. Blame the alcohol and solitude if you must,
but I loved the Birdman.
To begin, magical realism I feel is a dangerous aesthetic to
play with. There are many examples both
in literature and cinema of stories that have gone disastrously off the rails
in this genre. Recent examples include
Haruki Mukami’s painful new novel Colorless Tsuru Tasaki, the execrable Beasts of the Southern
Wild. Why Birdman succeeds where others
have failed is that the movie takes pains to keep the reality aspect of magical
realism front and center. Michael
Keatons character may float in the air, but he has real and relatable
problems. Birdman does an amazing job of
balancing these two forces drawing the viewer into the experience such that
when “magical” things happen they seem truly magical.
One tactic used to splendid effect to ground the movie is
amazing use of cinematography creating the illusion that the entire movie was
shot in one take. This grounds the movie
both geographically as the camera floats throughout the New York theater where
most of the movie takes place, but temporally as well using shadows to mark the
passage of time during a segue filmed against a brick backdrop.
Connected to this even the soundtrack is a used a tool to
ground the viewer. I couldn’t help but
smile when the jazz drummer creating the beat occasionally shows up on
screen. This attempt to blur the lines
of reality could come off as tacky in the hands of a less skilled director,
production team, and actors, like a so many failed shoot wrestling angles which
end up just making the audience uncomfortable.
Due to this part of the excitement of watching the movie for
me was the meta tension inherent in such an ambitious project. I felt like one
wrong misstep and the whole movie would come apart at the seams revealing it as
a trite mess, but from opening shot to the final brilliant ambiguous ending,
and all of the jellyfish in between Birdman came through brilliantly.
To quantify a movie that works to be unquantifiable I give
Birdman 4.5 out of 5 units
(The choice of unit is up to you)
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