Iñárritu: Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014)

Over the last couple of years, superhero films have ballooned to contain pretty much every mainstream blockbuster genre, to the point where it feels as if their apocalyptic horizons have somehow become syonymous with the future of cinema itself – or, perhaps more accurately, the post-cinematic future, the future of digital media, a future that perhaps only a superhero could save us from now. No film has tapped into that tendency as beautifully and incredibly as Birdman, which looks back past the post-9/11 flowering of superheroes to the post-Batman revival in the late 80s and early 90s, casting Michael Keaton as a washed-up superhero actor – resposible for the Birdman cycle – who’s trying to make a comeback with an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. Collapsing this antiquated superhero sensibility back into an even older theatrical sense of spectacle, the entire film takes place in and around the theatre as opening night approaches, and is shot – or gives the impression of being shot – in a single, unbroken take, as Inarritu builds an ensemble drama about an ensemble drama whose cast branches out to include Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan, Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone and Lindsay Duncan. Scored to a near-continuous drum arrangement by Antonio Sanchez, every encounter feels a little too plosive to be quite realistic – a slap or a punch is only ever a moment away – while the entire film has a percussive, dissonant quality, a cracked-up Carveresque sense of pace, that makes it feel chiselled, hammered and beaten out of celluloid, sculptural in the same way that theatre can be sculptural. Of course, that produces a certain nostalgia for analog bravura, for the theatricality of cinema, but the continuity of this single unbroken shot is so total that there can be no real doubt that it’s digital, as Inarritu obsessively traces out the lateral sightlines of the theatre, as well as creating new ones that don’t exist, until the whole film feels caught in the tensile space between onstage and backstage, just as the camera feels perpetually caught between what’s behind and in front of it. In fact, there is no real sense of anything “behind” the camera anymore, no real sense of any directorial agency, just a generalised telekinetic presence that makes the camera feel like an emanation of each character’s thought and gaze. Poised in the wings of celebrity and publicity we all seem to inhabit now, in a loop between stage and audience that gets wilder and more anarchic as the film proceeds but always comes full circle, it’s a camera that's alternately hyporeal and "super-real," conceding and rehearsing its limitations only to finally leave even Twitter and Facebook behind, just as the cluttered, media-crazed cityscape the theatre is always holding at bay also feels peculiarly open to the sky, converges on whatever Birdman might still bring from above, whether it's salvation or just another tweet.