Odds are audiences will notice that Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance doesn’t quite feel like any other film they’ve seen. But they may not be sure why, at first. Constantly in motion, yet contained almost entirely within and around a smallish Broadway theater and a nearby bar, Birdman will feel to them fluid, alive, and ethereal—different from most big screen fare.
After a while, they may realize what director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has done: Birdman consists of a series of long takes stitched together to resemble one extremely long long take. The effect is stunning, and a bit disconcerting.
The camera follows Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), a washed up movie star who is most famous for donning the cowl of Birdman (get it?), as he attempts to stage an adaptation of a Raymond Carver novel. Previews are set to begin when one of his costars is nearly killed by a falling light; riding to the rescue is the Method-obsessed Mike (Edward Norton), who challenges Riggan and the rest of the cast to make something more of themselves. Also on hand is Riggan’s daughter (and recovering drug addict) Sam (Emma Stone), who provides some familial resentment to help give Riggan and the audience perspective.
The refusal of the camera to cut from scene to scene despite the fact that the two-hour film takes place over several days of rehearsal and performances lends the proceedings a dream-like quality. We flow from day into night, the camera spying on Sam and Mike making out on a light rig above the stage, before it descends to Mike and Riggan in front of a packed house.
That dreamtime logic helps explain some of the film’s more surreal moments, such as when Riggan leaps off a building, flies around the city, and comes to the front of his theater—but hops out of a cab and into the lobby. We could choose to believe that this—as well as Riggan’s ability to move things with his mind and the discussions he has with a pompous version of the alter ego that made him famous—is the imaginary way in which he deals with the disappointments of the real world.
However, Iñárritu’s choice to shoot the film as one long, unending, disjointed-but-continuous scene suggests that there is something more at work. And his inclusion of a story from Riggan about a near-death experience could lead one to believe that the experience wasn’t so much "near-death" as "deadly." Are these Riggan’s final, disjointed thoughts? An ocean’s worth of regrets rendered as one final scene, as he tries to make sense of his life?
It’s too bad that Birdman is preoccupied with a rather banal complaint about the state of the movie industry. Iñárritu is content to sneer at the audiences who flock to spectacles such as Riggan’s comic book series. In the early going, while trying to track down a replacement for his injured costar, Riggan suggests Woody Harrelson or Michael Fassbender or Jeremy Renner—all of whom, we are led to believe, are wasting their talents on big budget fare such as The Hunger Games and X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Avengers.
Indeed, one gets the sense from Birdman that filmmaking is in such bad shape, creatively, that no one would ever spend $18 million to produce a semi-experimental feature by a foreign director about the internal life of a struggling, middle-aged man played by a non-star.
The unexpected virtue of ignorance, indeed.