There is an electrifying uniqueness to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest film, Oscar front-runner Birdman. The director, previously reaching heights of greatness fifteen years ago with his brutal and beautiful triptych Amores Perros, has created a work which slides effortlessly through humour and pathos, through sincerity and satire, and somehow emerges a consummate whole.
Birdman follows washed-up superhero actor Riggan Thompson (a dynamic Michael Keaton) as he stages a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s masterpiece of short fiction, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’. And indeed, although the play itself is represented only in snatches, the themes and ideas of the inspiration permeate the film. There is much discussion of Carver: as a writer, as an influence, as a drunk, and this can be seen seeping into the very veins of the dialogue.
Iñárritu assembled a team of three other writers for the occasion, and the melange of styles heard in the dialogue is no doubt a result of this four-headed voice. But in amongst the drama, humour and metafiction, a distinctly Carveresque tone is heard. Over the course of the film the seemingly ubiquitous ennui, self-obsession, a kind of post-modern existentialism, claws at all of the richly conceived characters. They are unwittingly typical Carver personas: dissatisfied, fearful of their own irrelevance.
Emma Stone excels as Riggan’s troubled, fresh-out-of-rehab daughter/assistant Sam, and Zach Galifianakis is uncharacteristically restrained as the tightly-wound and somewhat effete stage manager, but it is Ed Norton’s turn as veteran stage actor Mike Shiner which distinguishes itself as the secondary focus of the piece. As the story seems to descend into a wrestling match for creative control of the play, Norton is the perfect foil, both comic and tragic, for Keaton.
Much has been made of the ‘single shot’ technique; indeed, there is a truly startling kineticism to the cinematography. The camera, the narrative and indeed the audience seem to careen from one scene to the next; always slick, never meretricious. That a film can incorporate what is, to the watching eye, an hour and a half-long single tracking shot, and that this not be the focus of the movie, is a testament to the wonderful unity of form and content.
It is a complete and rounded picture. It is simultaneously a profoundly intimate character study and a broad and distanced exploration of the nature of art and truth. It is so many things at once, yet all the factors stunningly cohere into the year’s first truly great film.