Birdman (film)
Birdman, stylized as BİRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), is a 2014 American dark comedy-drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The film stars Michael Keaton as a washed-up Hollywood actor, best known for playing a superhero named Birdman, and follows the struggles he faces while trying to make a comeback by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". The film's supporting cast includes Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, and Naomi Watts.
Birdman
- Alejandro G. Iñárritu
- Nicolás Giacobone
- Alexander Dinelaris Jr.
- Armando Bó
- Alejandro G. Iñárritu
- John Lesher
- Arnon Milchan
- James W. Skotchdopole
- Regency Enterprises
- New Regency
- M Productions
- Le Grisbi Productions
- TSG Entertainment
- Worldview Entertainment
- August 27, 2014 (Venice)
- October 17, 2014 (United States)
119 minutes[1]
United States
English
$103.2 million[3]
With a brief exception, Birdman is presented as though it was filmed in one continuous take, an idea Iñárritu had from the film's conception. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki believed that the recording time necessary for the long take approach could not have been made with older technology. The film was shot in New York City during the spring of 2013 with a budget of $16.5 million, jointly financed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, Regency Enterprises, and Worldview Entertainment. It premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival in 2014.
Birdman had a limited theatrical release in the United States on October 17, 2014, followed by a wide release on November 14. Grossing more than $103 million worldwide, the film received critical acclaim, with praise for its screenplay, direction, cinematography, and the performances of the cast (particularly Keaton, Norton, and Stone). It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography from a total of nine nominations, tying it with The Grand Budapest Hotel for the most nominated and awarded film at the 87th Academy Awards. It also won Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture at the 21st Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Keaton and Best Screenplay at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards.
Plot[edit]
Riggan Thomson is a faded actor famous for playing a superhero named Birdman in a film trilogy from 1989 to 1992. He is tormented by the mocking and critical internal voice of his past self as Birdman and frequently visualizes himself performing feats of levitation and telekinesis. Riggan is trying to regain recognition by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". However, the Birdman voice wants Riggan to return to blockbuster cinema and insists that he is essential to Riggan's identity.
Riggan's best friend and lawyer Jake is producing the play, which co-stars Riggan's girlfriend Laura and Broadway newcomer Lesley. Riggan's daughter Sam, a recovering drug addict with whom he is trying to reconnect, works as his assistant. The day before the first preview, a light fixture falls onto Riggan's hapless co-star Ralph. At Lesley's suggestion, Riggan replaces Ralph with her boyfriend, the brilliant but volatile and self-absorbed method actor Mike Shiner.
The first previews are disastrous: Mike breaks character over replacing his gin with water, attempts to rape Lesley during a sex scene, and complains that the prop gun does not look natural. When Riggan berates Sam after finding her smoking marijuana, she insultingly rebukes and chastises him, telling him that he is irrelevant and the play is for his own vanity. Riggan clashes continually with Mike, culminating in a brawl after Riggan reads a New York Times interview with Mike in which he steals Riggan's personal reason for doing a Raymond Carver play. Jake persuades Riggan to continue with the play.
During the final preview, after seeing Mike and Sam kissing backstage, Riggan accidentally locks himself outside with his robe stuck in the fire escape door. He is forced to walk through Times Square in his briefs and enter through the audience to do the final scene. A concerned Sam is waiting in his dressing room after the show, and she thinks the performance was very unusual but interesting. She shows him that the Times Square footage is going viral and explains how this actually helps him.
Riggan goes to a bar for a drink and approaches Tabitha Dickinson, a cynical and highly influential theater critic. She promises to "kill" his play with a deprecating review without seeing it. On the way back, Riggan buys a pint of whiskey, drinks it, and passes out on a stoop. The next day, walking to the theater with a severe hangover, he visualizes Birdman trying to convince him to abandon the play and make a fourth Birdman film. Riggan then imagines himself flying through the streets of Manhattan before arriving at the theater.
On opening night, the play goes very well. In his dressing room, a strangely calm Riggan confesses to his ex-wife, Sylvia, that several years ago, he attempted to drown himself in the ocean after she caught him having an affair. He also tells her about the Birdman voice, which she ignores. After Sylvia leaves, Riggan picks up a real gun for the final scene in which his character commits suicide. At the climax, Riggan shoots himself in the head on stage. The play receives a standing ovation.
Riggan wakes up in a hospital—the suicide attempt merely blew off his nose, which has been surgically reconstructed. Tabitha has published a glowing review of the play, mistaking the suicide attempt for a new acting technique. Sam visits with flowers and takes a picture of him to share with the skyrocketing number of followers on the Twitter account she has created for him.
While she steps outside to find a vase, Riggan goes into the bathroom, removes the bandages revealing his swollen new nose, and says goodbye to Birdman, seen seated on the toilet. Fascinated by the birds flying outside his room, he opens the window, peers up at them, and then climbs out onto the ledge. Sam returns to an empty room and frantically runs to the open window, scanning the ground before slowly looking up into the sky and smiling at what she sees.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu originally conceived the film as a comedy filmed in a single shot set in a theatre. The original choice behind the film's genre, which was subsequently re-adapted to concentrate on Riggan's final emotional tailspin, came from the director wanting to see a change in his approach. All his previous films were dramas, and after directing Biutiful, he did not want to approach his new film in the same tragic manner again.[4] The decision to make the film appear as a single shot came from his realization that "we live our lives with no editing". By presenting the film as a continuous shot, he could "submerge the protagonist in an 'inescapable reality' and take the audience with him".[5] Iñárritu shared his idea with the Argentine screenwriters/cousins Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bo, as well as playwright Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., who had all worked with him on his previous film.[6][a] Their first reaction was to tell him the continuous-shot idea could not work.[4] According to Dinelaris and Giacobone, "huge" and "important" people told him to not even try the project for the same reason.[6] Iñárritu himself described the technique as "almost suicidal", worrying that it would be distracting, instead of immersive.[8] Dinelaris later said that had they truly paused and considered the idea, they might have talked Iñárritu out of it.[4]
The personal and vocational experiences of the four co-writers were central to writing the script. Dinelaris' exposure to Broadway shaped the depictions of rehearsals and events backstage, though he admitted exaggerating these. He also felt his background writing long scenes of dialogue helped since scenes in the film "were really more like play scenes".[6] Iñárritu's own experiences influenced many of Birdman's themes. "What this film talks about, I have been through", Iñárritu recalled. "I have seen and experienced all of it; it's what I have been living through the last years of my life."[4] Dinelaris described this aspect as "a laughing look at oneself", but said it had to be done in a comedic way; otherwise, "it would have been the most unbelievably self-absorbed look at the subject".[4] Themes from Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", which Riggan adapts for stage in the story, also influenced the script. Iñárritu wanted to find the connection between the themes in Riggan's story and those of Carver's.[6] Because of this, it was important to the director that Carver's story be the subject of the play depicted within the film. Therefore, Iñárritu stated that his desire to use Carver's work was "terrifying" because the rights to using the Carver material were still subject to the possibility of being rejected during development of the film, but no issues arose. Carver's widow, writer Tess Gallagher, loved the script and permitted the adaptation, saying that Carver would be laughing about the film.[4]
While some aspects of the film – the first frame with Riggan, for instance – went unchanged from Birdman's conception to release,[4] others went through several iterations. One of these was the sequence in which alter ego Birdman takes complete control over Riggan's thoughts. The writers knew it would occur at Riggan's lowest point, so at one stage planned for it to happen after Riggan hears the initial negative press coverage and destroys his dressing room. In another discarded version, Riggan tries to drown himself in Central Park and flies out to save himself.[6]
The film's ending also changed, the final version being written halfway through filming.[9] The original intended to depict Johnny Depp in Riggan's dressing room with a Pirates of the Caribbean poster in the back. Iñárritu grew to strongly dislike this ending, calling it "so embarrassing", and rewrote it with Dinelaris and Giacobone after a new ending came to him in a dream.[9][10] Iñárritu was reluctant to describe the original ending, but it was leaked by Dinelaris. He said the original ending was set in the theatre, instead of the hospital, and involved Depp putting on Riggan Thomson's wig, and in Jack Sparrow's voice, "... the poster asks Depp, 'What the fuck are we doing here, mate?', and it was going to be the satire of the endless loop of that."[11] The director and co-authors ruled out the satirical ending, and favored the new, more ambiguous, ending.[10][11][12]
The project of co-writing was expedited by the collaboration between the four co-writers on the internet working from different geographical locations. With Iñárritu in Los Angeles, Giacobone and Bo in Buenos Aires, and Dinelaris in New York, the script was mainly written through Skype calls and emails.[4] Although this complicated the writing process, Dinelaris said he believed the best ideas in Birdman came from Skype sessions at two in the morning where he and Giacobone were "cracking each other up". Incorporating the one-shot feature also affected the writing. Bo said: "We wrote everything thinking of this one shot, and a lot of decisions that would mostly be taken in the editing room were taken before shooting". The one-shot approach meant the scenes could not be removed or re-ordered in post-production, so the writers needed to be "very, very sure about what was on the page".[6] As a result, it took about a year and a half to complete the final draft.[13] As Dinelaris summarized, "You have to be an idiot to do it all in one shot. You have to be an idiot to attempt it. It takes a great, great deal of ignorance to not pay attention to the difficulties and to think you're going to do this. Birdman looks like a good idea now, but [at the time of production] we did not know how we would land."[6]
Analysis and themes[edit]
The director has emphasized and defended the various ambiguities intentionally included in the film: "At the ending of the film, [it] can be interpreted as many ways as there are seats in the theater."[70] Many aspects of film theory were debated concerning the film by critical reviews which included, among other subjects, (a) film genre; (b) intended and unresolved ambiguities of plot; and (c) the complex interaction of Riggan's personal life with his professional life as an actor. A short list of the diverse forms of film genre associated with the film has included it being referred to alternatively as a black-humor film, a mental health film, a realism/
The father-daughter themes in the film, portrayed through the relationship of Riggan and Samantha, were the "most difficult" and important parts of the film to depict for co-writers Dinelaris and Giacobone, as they both had similar experiences within their families involving their own relationships with their daughters. When the writers were asked about the meaning of the ambiguous ending which the director refused to comment upon, they stated that any comedic ending was completely ruled out. The writers also stated that reflections about the conclusion to the film were not directly concentrated upon Riggan or the character of Birdman as much as upon the lives of the surviving characters portrayed in the film, in particular the portrayal of Riggan's daughter Samantha.[73][74]
Noting the thematic pull between Riggan's insanity or actual superpowers, Travis LaCouter of First Things writes that "the importance of these powers – real or imagined – is apparent: They are for Riggan the thing beyond the labels, the kernel of his genius and, because he sees drawing upon them as selling out, the source of his great angst." LaCouter concludes that "the quirky profundity of this film is in how it dares the viewer to consider the everyday magic that we tend to ignore, repress, or resent".[75]
Critics Barbara Schweizerhof and Matthew Pejkovici see the film's central theme as a satirical critique of contemporary theatrical realism, with Pejkovici comparing it favorably to Fellini's film 8½ (1963). As Pejkovici states: "Much like Fellini's 1960[sic] classic 8½, Iñárritu's Birdman is a very intimate film about an artist's malaise, yet is epic, innovative, and ambitious in approach. Iñárritu captures the artist's battle between ambition, admiration, and celebrity with stunning scope and skill in the form of a one-take format, as his camera sweeps through the backstage corridors, across the stage, out on the busy NYC streets, and back again in breathtaking fashion."[76]
Thematically, Richard Brody also compared it to Opening Night (1977) by John Cassavetes.[77] Brody said that the actors played in "the sort of modern naturalism, without eccentricity of gesture, excess of expression, or heightened and formalistic precision, that is the business-casual of contemporary cinema".[77] The Wall Street Journal's Caryn James compared the story to that of Don Quixote (who believes himself to be a knight), as the main character believes he is a superhero (the equivalent to a knight in the 21st century).[78] This relationship was also highlighted by the scholarly literature.[79]