Every so often, a movie will come along that works like a magic sequence for its once-forgotten star, and for the unique message it carries. It happened last with Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler’. The same Mickey who made films that went into the archives they were so damn good; ‘A Prayer for the Dying’, ‘9 ½ Weeks’, ‘Wild Orchid’, even ‘Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man’. And yet, circumstances and bad judgement stuttered his career until Darren Aronofsky came along.
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Michael Keaton found Alejandro González Iñárritu in the same serendipitous way. ‘Birdman’ isn’t without its flaws, but the claws it rakes through your heart is what you will take away with you, and it will throb dully for years to come. The movie is about a forgotten movie star who is trying to make a mark in theatre. His cast is made up of a young, arrogant Brando type whose talent and hubris battle for supremacy, actresses who are struggling for a foothold in both his and the audience’s memory, and a daughter and wife who still love him despite his self-obsession.
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What makes ‘Birdman’ a movie that people are talking about is how cleverly this cast plays its parts. Ed Norton is sublime. He’s always been the kind of actor who looks like a dreamy poet but who can bring a coldness out and place it before your frightened eyes in an instant. While you tremble, not knowing what will come next, he can either soothe your fluttering pulses or crush your hopes. ‘Birdman’ is better than ‘Fight Club’ and ‘The Hulk’ in displaying Norton’s powers, you hate and love him in equal measure and no one displays narcissism better than he does. An actor playing an actor is about as difficult a thing as you can imagine, and if it wasn’t for the blazing meteor that’s Keaton, you would remember no one else, even with the towering Naomi Watts and Emma Stone around.
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It’s Keaton’s baby, though. As Riggan, he is broken, angry, bewildered but will not give up, so will either be Sisyphus or a phoenix rising. Riggan is aware of the importance of marketing, so understands how to play his part, both personal and professional, but self-doubt is his real exacting mistress, one who whispers in the dead of night, “Honey, your best days are behind you, only I’m here, now.”
It’s not that Riggan doesn’t see what the world is and what he has become, but his vanity, that oh-so-crucial part for those whose lives revolve around being someone else and believing they can do that better than the next guy, is both crippling and well-founded, an uncomfortable pairing at the best of times.
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A clever one is when Riggan’s daughter Sam (Stone) shows him the power of social media and life as a reality show (which is the real enemy of actors and celebs and ordinary Joes; talk about losing the plot when it comes to figuring out what actually matters in your daily grind and what is a circus), more relevant today than it was when Keaton was making his mark with ‘Batman’ and ‘Beetlejuice’.
So what is the flaw in Iñárritu’s genius? It’s subjective. I loathe open endings. For God’s sake, isn’t my life’s open ending bad enough? I don’t want to be subjected to it in the movies. The last scene of ‘Birdman’ is maddening. What really happened? and damn your metaphors.
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But I would still encourage everyone to see it. Its genius is that this is not just a movie with a tragi-comic story well told, but an expose on human frailty and its hardcore steel twin, the visual emotional mirror to our actual twisted DNA. I think this is what makes our species ultimately a thing to admire. It’s ‘Birdman’ that makes you believe we possess it.
Sheba Thayil is a journalist and writer. She was born in Bombay, brought up in Hong Kong, and exiled to Bangalore. While editing, writing and working in varied places like The Economic Times, Gulf Daily News, New Indian Express andCosmopolitan, it is the movies and books, she says, that have always sustained her. She blogs at http://shebathayil.blogspot.com/