Birdman (2014)
Or (Don't These People Have to Get Back Onstage?)
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to a very special performance of I’d Like To Blank The Academy. Over the course of several pages/scrolls on your phone, your authors will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even dream … about the 2014 Best Picture winner Birdman. Prepare yourselves as we dive into an unstable tick-tock of a tale following a washed-up movie star as he seeks redemption and artistic relevance on Broadway.
Please note that there will be a brief intermission about halfway through the post, so we kindly ask that you keep all vaping and hanky-panky until then. Alright, time to sit back and enjoy the show!
(curtain opens)
Previews
What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?
Ellen: I definitely remember that there was a lot of buzz about this movie. As Tyler will say below, I believe there’s something superhero-y and a meta connection with the Michael-Keaton-Batman of it all, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about the plot.
Tyler: I have vague recollections of random aspects of this movie: that it was sort of a meta role for Michael Keaton (having been Batman years ago), that it’s shot in a single-shot style a la 1917, and … some scene with Emma Stone staring astonishingly out a window?
Plots & Feelings
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): A washed-up superhero actor attempts to revive his fading career by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production.
Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):
Riggan Thomson sits cross-legged in his underwear in his Broadway dressing room, levitating a few feet off the floor. Birdman posters adorn the walls. Thomson became famous for the superhero trilogy from 1989 to 1992, and in an attempt to regain recognition, he’s writing, directing, and starring in an adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He’s interrupted by a Skype call from his daughter/assistant, who’s fresh from rehab and hates this job (and also everything). Riggan talks with his best friend, lawyer, and producer, who are all one dude named Jake while walking to rehearsal. Things are going alright, but co-star Ralph cannot act at all, but not to worry: a light fixture falls and hits him in the head with a spray of blood1!
Tyler: Man that Skype ringtone was a real blast from the pre-pandemic past.
Ellen: I wrote the same thing! Also, uh, that man was levitating! And he tells Jake that he made Ralph’s accident happen. Interesting.
Riggan and Jake power walk out of there, pitching different (real-life) actors to replace Ralph, but darn it all, they’re all in superhero movies of their own! Back in the dressing room, the menacing, growling voice of Birdman says Ralph had it coming, but berates Riggan for even trying. He’s aiming for Birdman 4, baby! It’s other co-star Lesley to the rescue. She’s dating a brilliant actor Mike Shiner, but he does have a reputation for quitting and/or being fired from shows. Perfect! He’s been running lines with Lesley, so he knows them all, and actually, Riggan, he has thoughts on your adaptation!
It’s a whirlwind as they prep for preview week, and the scenes meld together from rehearsal into the first preview. Everything goes great until Mike flips out because someone replaced his stage gin with water, because of course this insufferable man is method. After the show, Riggan’s ex-wife Sylvia is waiting for him, wanting to know how Sam is doing. She’s pretty frustrated2 to find out he refinanced the Malibu house to pay for the show, because it was supposed to be for Sam. Oh, and Laura, the final actor in the play and Riggan’s girlfriend pops her head in but retreats quickly.
Must be time for Riggan to confront Mike about the show. They end up at a bar, with Mike condescendingly saying that this is New York, not a backlot. Riggan reveals his childhood backstory for wanting to do this Ray Carver adaptation, and Mike is like “cool bro, I’m going to go be antagonistic toward intense theater critic Tabitha over at the end of the bar, byeeeeee.”
Freshman film students be like (Source) Riggan returns to find Sam has done all her work, weirdly? And oh yeah, she’s hidden a joint! They get into a fight about why he’s even doing this, his disdain for social media, and Sam contends that no one cares about him and the show is just for his vanity. Riggan takes a few puffs and walks right into the dream sequence of the next preview show. Mike attempts to actually have sex with Lesley on stage and she is furious, so that’s our disaster for the night. Riggan and Laura comfort her, Laura via an unexpected kiss3, but the moment is interrupted by Mike coming to apologize. Lesley promptly throws a hair dryer at him4. He takes a moment to beg Riggan to get a better prop gun so he actually feels threatened, and goes and flirts with Sam on the roof.
Ellen: Mike may as well have said, “Hello. I am going to foreshadow now. There will be a real gun later. Thank you.”
Front page news: Mike was inspired as a teenager by Raymond Carver coming to his high school play! Hey, wasn’t that Riggan’s story? Riggan and Mike get into a verbal (and then physical) fight, ending in Riggan trashing his dressing room (using both physical and metaphysical means) and yelling at himself. The Birdman voice argues that Riggan was only “Hollywood” miserable, and hey they could just go back to it!
Ellen: I’ll have more to say about this later, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be thinking about his “powers” at this point. He starts off telekinesis-smashing things around the room and then transitions to his hands, which is how Jake finds him.
Meanwhile, Mike and Sam are talking again, playing truth or dare on the roof and making me personally uneasy. Riggan spots them kissing backstage, so he goes out for a stress smoke but uh oh! The door closes on his robe, and he has to get back for his final scene. He’s forced to scramble through Times Square in his underwear while people are yelling “Birdman??” at him. He bursts through the back of the theater and finishes the show. Afterwards, Sam shows him the now-viral video and tells him “believe it or not, this is power.”
Tyler: While I thought the scene of him running through Times Square and entering through the back of the theatre was well done, I still got so mad at him for locking himself out like that! You idiot! I was angrily rooting for him to make it back in time.
Riggan gets drunk and goes back to that bar, eventually approaching Tabitha. She’s already decided that she’s going to kill his play because she thinks it’s an affront to the art of theater and that he’s a spoiled child. The barb “you’re no actor; you’re a celebrity” is enough to send him looking for a fifth of whiskey. He wakes up on the street, and Birdman is back at it, walking right behind him and singing the praises of one last blockbuster. Explosions, loud noises, villains - it lets people escape their lives. Riggan ends up on a roof5 and leaps, soaring through the streets of New York. He lands back at the theater and walks in, with a cab driver chasing him, yelling that he didn’t pay.
Ellen: So here, we’re like, “OK, he did not fly through New York, he took a cab, and the feathered voice in his head is now a full-on manifestation. I see what we’re doing.” I will again come back to this!
And the scene flows right into people coming out of the theater on opening night, and reception to the first act is positive! In Riggan’s dressing room, he and Sylvia talk. He tells her about his “little voice,” which she does not pick up on, and also that he tried to drown himself after she caught him cheating, but the water was full of jellyfish. On that cheery note, back to the stage! Riggan grabs the gun he has hidden behind some boxes and proceeds straight through the backstage and into the final scene. Tabitha is in the front row, and he delivers his monologue and shoots himself in the head, receiving a standing ovation.
Tyler: The shot of the audience after he shoots himself is fantastic, as they just sit and wonder if it’s part of the play or not. The ability to single out Tabitha in the crowd, too, was impressive.
Riggan wakes up in the hospital with Jake and Sylvia at his side. Turns out, he blew off his nose, but hey, Tabitha wrote a rave review! While Jake goes to yell at the press, Sam comes in with flowers. She takes a photo and teases that this will freak out his booming Twitter following, thanks to the account she made for him. They share a tender moment for probably the first time in like 20 years. She steps out to find a vase, and Riggan goes into the bathroom and examines his bruised face and surgically reconstructed nose. Birdman is seated on the toilet, and Riggan says goodbye. He looks out the window in wonder at all the birds up here in a high, high floor of the hospital. He opens the truly gigantic window6 and steps onto the ledge. Sam returns to an empty room, horrified when she sees the open window. She rushes to look out, scanning the ground before looking up and smiling.
Ellen: SO CAN HE FLY OR WHAT?!!
Tyler: This is Inception-wobbly-top levels of ending ambiguity, except it continues a trend (that you’ll discuss later) of not fully investigating Riggan’s “abilities.” Though there’s obviously no one “answer,” I think one interpretation of the ending could be that Riggan’s suicide attempt (or him dead-ass leaping off a building earlier) was actually successful, with everything we see thereafter being some sort of dream state/form of afterlife. Think about all of the positive things that happen afterwards: he had a gun to his head but only managed to mess up his nose, which was pretty quickly reconstructed; his play, and particularly his performance, receives critical and commercial acclaim; he’s surrounded by the only people he cares about (Jake, his ex-wife, and his daughter), with people lighting candles in his name at a safe distance away; and, in the very end, someone (perhaps the person he cares about most) notices and is in awe of his “abilities.” It all seems almost too wrapped-up-nicely-with-a-bow for it to all actually be true … whatever “true” means in this movie anyway.
Ellen: At least with Inception you know to ask the question, but I think this is a more believable interpretation than the movie just not following its own rules. Up until the moment Sam looked up, I guess my thought was that the ending was more Irony or (When You Get What You Want But Don’t Want It Anymore).
Intermission
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Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?
Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.
Birdman’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:
Birdman was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won the Oscar for Best Director for his efforts. He also won the award the following year for directing The Revenant, becoming just the third director ever to do so in consecutive years, after John Ford (for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley) and our friend from Cleopatra Joseph L. Mankiewicz (for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve).
Iñárritu was also the first Mexican filmmaker to be nominated for either Best Director or as a producer in the history of the Academy Awards. He and fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro are apparently known in the film industry as “The Three Amigos.”
Ellen: Adorable.
In addition to directing, Iñárritu co-wrote Birdman with Argentinian cousins Nicolás Giacobone and Armando Bó and American screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris Jr., all of whom he worked with on a previous film. It was co-written largely through Skype calls and emails, as Iñárritu was in Los Angeles, Giacobone and Bó were in Buenos Aires, and Dinelaris was in New York. Unsurprisingly, it took about a year and a half to finish the final draft of the script.
Ellen: I’m so used to stories like that out of the pandemic that sometimes I forget people had to collaborate remotely before 2020.
Tyler: I know right? It makes you wonder how many future movies will have tidbits like this in their Wikipedia pages, or if it’ll just become so normalized that it’s not even worth mentioning.
According to Dinelaris, the film’s ending originally involved Johnny Depp in Riggan’s dressing room with a Pirates of the Caribbean poster in the background. In the scene, Depp would put on Riggan’s wig and the poster would ask Depp (in Jack Sparrow’s voice): “What the fuck are we doing here, mate?” Iñárritu claims that the ending that made the final cut came to him in a dream halfway through filming.
Ellen: Excuse me while I think about this for the next 5 years.
In a meeting to discuss the role of Riggan, the first thing Michael Keaton asked the director was whether he was making fun of him (regarding his role in Tim Burton's Batman films). After Iñárritu explained the role and the film more, Keaton agreed to play Riggan. Nevertheless, Birdman contains several references to Burton's Batman films, including the year Riggan is mentioned to have last played Birdman being 1992, when Batman Returns came out.
The “single-shot” filming approach was overseen by Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Lubezki became the first person in Academy history to win Best Cinematography three years in a row, having won it for his work in Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant.
Ellen: The cinematography is about the only thing I liked about The Revenant, so good on him.
Tyler: Perhaps we’ll cover this in its own post, but I wonder if The Revenant will be this generation’s Apocalypse Now in that it’s a well-made absolute SLOG of a movie that had some wild filming issues.
The scene in which Riggan is forced to run through Times Square in his underwear was filmed with real onlookers instead of extras. Iñárritu hired a group of street drummers to dance and perform nearby to distract the crowd. He later said: “All the tourists wanted to look at these drummers. A half-naked man in Times Square? They’ve seen that before.”
Oscar NomNomNomz
Since we all know a movie is nothing without the food and drink it incorporates.
It’s now time to award the Oscar for Best Snacktor in a Supporting Role7. And the nomnomnominees are:
Several glasses of gin that should probably be water
A glass of whiskey that should probably be coffee
A bottle of whiskey that should definitely be water
And the Oscar goes to … the bottle of whiskey they should definitely be water! Unfortunately, Birdman flew off with the bottle, so we will accept this award on its behalf.
Fill In The Blank
How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?
Ellen: I’d like to get The Academy roses, knowing they do not prefer roses. I do love the way this movie is made. I really appreciate the ambition of the seamless scene-to-scene transitions. It looked beautiful, and it managed to convey the passage of time without being clunky, either via timelapse or letting us infer based on what’s occurring in another room. Everyone was capital A acting their way through. The score was also gripping, and as we’ll discuss, Riggan is clearly not okay, so constant drums mimicking his unsettled mind really worked for me.
I just wanted to get into Riggan’s mental state more! Obviously the Birdman voice and then the hero himself exist throughout the movie, but that and the fact that Riggan is hallucinating (or IS he?) superpowers are almost never discussed. Sylvia ignores Riggan’s comment about his “little voice” (although to be fair, if he’d been less vague, she probably would have paid attention), and Riggan quietly tells Jake he made Ralph’s accident happen. That’s it, by my count. Being so well-known for such a specific character has got to take a huge toll beyond the usual parasocial fan/celebrity relationship, because people don’t even necessarily think they know Riggan - they think they know Birdman. What I assume to be a very real struggle just got reduced down to easy-money-sellout vs. worthwhile-art debate, and while I’m sure whether or not someone in a franchise role is taken seriously as an actor is a concern, it doesn’t seem like that alone should account for a full-blown apparition of Birdman.
To intertwine this concept with an insufferable punching down on popular movies (see Tyler’s many thoughts below) made an otherwise really interesting idea less compelling to me. And on the powers thing, I thought it did a great job of building up a question as to the rules of this reality, like maybe Riggan could do these things, and then eventually informing us that no, it’s all in his head, just like Birdman. But then he flew out of the hospital! I concede to Tyler’s “he actually died” interpretation, but it bumped for me, though what do I know - I have previously enjoyed Avengers movies, after all.
Tyler: I’d like to attempt to distract The Academy from an Oscar-baity film, but ultimately fail. On the surface, Birdman is a stylistically engaging and unique movie. The single-shot filming/editing technique and “frenetic drumming as a score” certainly helped keep my attention better than it otherwise would, so I applaud the movie for taking such big artistic swings with those because I think they paid off. All of the actors also give solid performances, with Michael Keaton obviously being a standout given how much he had to balance.
My issue is more with the air of superiority that accompanied the seemingly anti-movie subtext8 (and, sometimes, just text). While I’m sure the NY vs. LA/theatre vs. film rivalry is an actual thing, that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy all of the snide comments largely at the expense of a genre I’m never the first to defend: superhero movies. Though it seemingly found the perfect Trojan horse as its lead, Birdman seemed to go out of its way several times to prove its ~artistic~ bona fides by heavily implying that any successful movie with a superhero is inherently lesser-than. (Though I bet it was cathartic for Edward Norton.) There’s no relationship (one way or the other) between the completely subjective quality of a movie/play/whatever and its completely objective box office earnings.
It reminds me of something we’ve discussed (in real life) before: the success of restaurant chains. Chains generally have multiple stores because they were successful enough (because people enjoyed their product!) to at one point expand. You’re certainly allowed to not like a chain because you don’t like the way their food tends to taste, but there’s no denying that it got that way because it at least at some point was good enough to do so. Similarly, many superhero/franchise movies make a ton of money because people actually want to see them. And if you’re one of the many people who don’t want a Big Mac and want to support a smaller restaurant? There are tons of movies made every year that you can see that have zero capes or a number in the title. Why criticize something for its own success? (Looking at you Martin Scorsese.)
Phew I think this is the most I’ve written for my Fill In The Blank thus far. I’ve decided to save the rest of my thoughts for my upcoming manifesto Just Shut The Fuck Up You Snob, Or (Just Let People Like What They Like).
Let The Credits Roll
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Post-Credits Scene
Get a sneak peek at the next ILTBTA installment.
Bust out your dancing shoes, specifically your ballet flats, because our next ILTBTA post will be on the 1977 drama The Turning Point. Starring Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft, The Turning Point focuses on a former dancer and her daughter as the latter joins a ballet company. It is available to watch for free on Max, and can be rented from all the usual places nowhere else, apparently9, so if you’ve been considering getting a Max subscription now might be the time. Or don’t and just wait for our recap.
Until then, …
Ellen: I had to include the blood spray part, because the hit was so unexpected and dramatic that I wrote in my notes “RALPH IS DEAD.” Turns out he was not dead, but I thought everyone was handling this way too casually for a minute.
Sounds like Riggan’s ex-wife!
But don’t worry, this movie isn’t about women, so we’ll never come back to this.
Ellen: And now I’m thinking about The Parent Trap again.
Like father, like daughter?
Tyler: I know it’s only for plot purposes, but why is a window in a building that tall able to open so much?!
Results tabulated and certified by the accountants at Ernst & Yum™.
I know there are deeper, more philosophical themes at play here, but I’m nowhere near educated enough to comment on them.
There’s a reason this movie was almost part of our “In Memoriam” section.