Birdman, Or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)

I'm yet to see Spotlight, the most recent recipient of the Academy Award for Best Film, so thought I'd kick off my reviews of Oscar winning films with the previous winner before I completely forgot about it - because that is precisely what I have been dying to do ever since I danced a jig of joy and relief when the end credits rolled on this tiresome, pretentious rubbish masquerading as a comedy and satire on Hollywood.

Michael Keaton, famed as Bruce Wayne/Batman a generation ago in Tim Burton's dark, gothic, slyly comic take on the superhero, plays lead here as Riggan Thomson, an actor famed for playing dark, slyly comic superhero Birdman a generation ago. Geddit? Now he's trying to revitalise his non-existent career by writing/directing/starring in a Broadway play based on a Raymond Carver short story. Unfortunately for Riggan, he's haunted by his old Birdman alter-ego, which mocks and undermines his confidence at every turn. Riggan may also be able to perform various superhero-esque feats such as telekinesis and levitation himself. Or is that Birdman again, mocking Riggan with delusions of these feats in his own head? Does anyone know? Do we care?

Riggan is joined on the adaptation by a cast of 'colourful' sidekicks including lead actress Lesley (Naomi Watts), her egotistical, smarmy but highly rated actor boyfriend Mike (Edward Norton) and his own daughter (Emma Stone) who's just out of rehab and working as Riggan's assistant. There's not so much a coherent plot as a sequence of long-winded, dull dialogues between characters on acting, the shallowness and fickleness of the Hollywood scene, and so on, interspersed with comic scenes (Keaton fights Norton while Norton is in his underwear! Keaton gets locked out of the theatre and has to walk through Times Square in his underwear!) that are not just forced and clichéd, but about as funny as Ebola.

The film reaches its nadir when Riggan bumps into influential critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan), who promises to trash his play without even seeing it, due to her hatred of Hollywood celebrities. Clearly, director Alejandro G. Iñárritu seems to have used this scene to work out some anger towards what he perceives as unwarranted criticism of his prior work. Well, sorry, Mr. Iñárritu, but I sat through Birdman from start to end, and have no hesitation in trashing it because it is quite simply a bad film, and one that irritated me in all manner of different ways.

Birdman is the sort of film that critics love, and Hollywood loves to reward, because it comments on and ruminates on and even pokes fun at acting and the nature of acting and the system that chews up actors and spits them out when they are perceived to be too old or past their best or box office poison. There may well be a great satire out there that utilises these themes, or one yet to be made, but Birdman is nowhere near vicious or sharp-witted enough for its commentaries on the Hollywood scene to hit home. I sensed it had been rewarded chiefly because it played it safe when it came to satire. A truly great film would have gone to town with this material (and probably come home from Oscar empty-handed).

Keaton does his best with a thankless task. Riggan is a character that it's just hard to care much for. That's not the actor's fault, he simply isn't well-written or sympathetic enough. Half the time I rolled my eyes at his so-called problems rather than engaging with him as a real person. Edward Norton's Mike is a potentially funny caricature of a preening, ridiculous egotist, but the film simply doesn't do enough with him, while the talented Naomi Watts is stuck with a two-dimensional, flat nothing of a woman in Lesley. And while I'm no fan of Emma Stone as an actress, it would be hard for anyone to inject her character with spark and empathy - again, she just wasn't well-rounded enough; you just don't care about what happens to her. With regards the rest of the cast, I either don't remember or didn't engage with them enough to comment in detail on their performances.

A lot has been written about Birdman's gimmick of being filmed in 'one shot', but to me, this distracted from what little of the plot there was and didn't fit at all at times; like much of the rest of the film, it feels forced and unnatural, a 5-minute novelty stretched out to a full 90 odd minutes. Crucially, I also felt that it lacked the smooth sense of cinematography that a director such as Julien Temple managed to convey a generation ago on smaller budgets and lesser technology.

Lastly, Birdman fails in that most critical of areas for a comedy; it simply isn't funny. Most of the time, I didn't really know what it was trying to be. There might have been comic potential in the basic premise here, but it's lost quickly as the film descends into self-indulgent, insubstantial babble. 2015's other front runner for best film, Boyhood, may also have its detractors, but in my opinion it blows Birdman out of the water technically, thematically, and in terms of its ambition and acting. Heck, it even manages to be a bit funnier!

Birdman was almost universally praised by critics, and maybe I just didn't 'get it', but it feels about as weak, back-slapping and un-entertaining as an Oscar winner can get. Disappointing, unfunny and shallow.