A Broadway theatre, a faded superhero star, two hours edited to look like one continuous take. Best Picture 2014.
Riggan Thomson, an aging actor best-known for playing the superhero Birdman in three films two decades ago, is mounting his own Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The play opens in days. His co-star drops out before previews. His daughter, just out of rehab, works as his assistant. His ex-wife visits. The replacement co-star, a brilliant and difficult Broadway star named Mike Shiner, undermines him from the first rehearsal.
Riggan also, in moments alone, levitates and moves objects with his mind. The film never confirms whether these powers are real or whether Riggan is having a psychotic break. The film closes on his daughter looking out of a hospital window at the sky.
Birdman is constructed to appear as a single continuous shot, with hidden cuts disguised behind blacks, whip pans, and rotating camera moves. Emmanuel Lubezki — who had pioneered long-take sequences on Children of Men eight years earlier — shot the entire film with this in mind. The total film comprises approximately 25 carefully assembled long takes; the audience, on first viewing, perceives roughly two unbroken hours.
Iñárritu's argument for the technique is that the continuous camera puts the audience inside Riggan's interior state. He has no escape from himself; the audience has no escape from him. The film's editing rhythm is, paradoxically, faster than most theatrical features — but the cuts are invisible, so the perception is one of relentless continuity.
Michael Keaton had been the original Batman (Batman, 1989; Batman Returns, 1992). The casting of Keaton as a faded superhero actor is, openly, the film's commentary on Keaton's own career trajectory. The film does not pretend otherwise; Birdman's costume is visually derived from Keaton's Batman.
What makes the performance work is Keaton's willingness to play Riggan as both pathetic and, occasionally, the genuine artist Riggan believes himself to be. The film does not let Riggan off the hook for his self-importance; it also does not let his ex-wife, his daughter, or Mike Shiner off the hook for their respective contempt. The film is a serious portrait of an aging artist in a state of psychological emergency, and Keaton was nominated for Best Actor for it.
Antonio Sánchez's score is performed entirely on drums. The score is diegetic at unexpected moments — a drummer is occasionally visible playing in the corner of a Broadway theatre hallway — and non-diegetic at others. The choice gives the film a propulsive, anxious rhythm that no orchestral score could have produced.
Birdman won four Oscars at the 2015 ceremony: Best Picture, Best Director (Iñárritu), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography (Lubezki, his second consecutive after Gravity). The technical achievement is what the Academy honoured; the substance of the film — a meditation on the question of whether late-career relevance is worth chasing — is what made the technique mean something.