Birdman: Being willing to sort of die in order to move the reader.

***.5 by Tom Johnson

Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a dazzling piece of filmmaking. Emmanuel Lubezki claims director of photography credit here, bringing his tally of visually impressive, important films of this generation up to no less than four (Children of Men, Gravity, The Tree of Life)[1] and cementing his role as one of the most important figures in contemporary cinema. Formally, the film is stunning – it is likely that you have by this point heard that the central conceit is that it appears to be shot in one uninterrupted take – and it is this formal mastery that makes the film such fun to spend time with. The (nearly) all-drum score is equally inspired and a perfect match for the film’s stylistic joie de vivre, conjuring a mood and feeling quite like the jazz of Miles Davis at his creative peak. And the cast – at Mr. Iñárritu’s direction – puts in universally great work.

The film, however, is not without its faults. It has been frequently[2] derided as navel-gazing, and employs some postmodern flourishes that are, to be charitable, not fully successful. As much fun as the film is to watch and its accomplishments admirable, the freneticism borders on claustrophobic, filling up almost all of the two hours with some sort of camera-movement or dialogue with scarcely room for the audience to process the action or catch their collective breath. The wheels threaten to fall off in the third act, as it seems so often happens in film these days[3], and I am willing to commit to saying now that the ending did not “work” for me. All told, however, there is simply too much to love, too much brilliance to watch, and too much fun to be had to do anything other than recommend it without hesitation[4].

The central premise of Birdman is that Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton) plays a former action-film actor who has been unable to replicate his success since turning down the fourth film in the Birdman series. He has now turned to theater where he is adapting a version of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that he has written, is directing, and in which he is playing the main role. Narratively, Birdman is fairly straightforward. Things are not going well with the show, nor with Riggan personally, and we follow these threads through the phase of a production that theater folks might call “Hell week”[5]. We watch as Riggan struggles with his life and the show, the two mirroring each other in a tight choreography not unlike that of the cast locked in their tight ballet, weaving through the streets of New York, wrestling in the basement, or exploring confused sexuality in the dressing room, the camera swooping around the actors like a vulture. As mentioned, the cast is superb throughout, and will no doubt end up with some decorated hardware cabinets by next March – much is asked of them, and much is delivered – but the primary effect, for me at least, was a constant, head-scratching, “how did they do that?!” like in the dressing room scenes where the camera moves back and forth through a series of mirrors, occasionally pointing directly at them, without showing up in the frame itself.

The plot points read as fairly pedestrian and do little to fully explain what Birdman really is and what it does so well. Stylistically the film is jaw-dropping, but when it comes to substance, things become altogether murkier. There are question marks aplenty when Birdman is approached in totality. Indeed, Mr. Iñárritu infuses the film with a subtle, but pervasive sense of magic and surrealism. The film opens with a glimpse of a comet and a beach full of dead jellyfish. The first time we encounter the central character, he is there before us, in naught but his underwear, in full lotus position, floating in mid-air. Later, we see him twirl a cigarette case with extra-physical powers and similarly destroy his dressing room in a fit of rage. I am hesitant to presume Mr. Iñárritu’s intention with this technique. I could not come up with a satisfactory answer after just one viewing. But the important part, to me, is that I was too absorbed in the film’s strengths to much care to try and sort it out. The technique is no doubt meant to point to the psyche of the film’s central figure[6], but beyond that, I find the technique both affecting and a delight to watch, and I emerged from the film with little interest in dissecting it further. In that way, Birdman’s magic realism feels not unlike Haruki Murakami’s. Peculiar and mystical things happen, and attempts to explain them are secondary to how they make us feel. The film leaves plenty of room so that the technique can be ripped apart like the ending of Chris Nolan’s Inception – is Mr. Iñárritu leaving us clues? – but whereas I was bothered at Nolan’s techniques in that film – because they were central to the narrative - here, what is of importance is not whether Riggan has extra-physical powers, but that we care about him and the world he inhabits. At that, the film succeeds.

Much has already been written trying to identify what it is, really that Birdman is about. A favorite subject of critics in the early going is the film’s subject of the theater and film – either it is a celebration or condemnation of art or artists or a statement on the medium as it exists. Mr. Iñárritu himself has claimed that the film was inspired by his own meditation on mid-life. The use of theater conjures to my mind Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, a film that used the theater – and its central character, a director – as a metaphor for life. Approaching Birdman with these reference points in mind is not irrelevant – consensus suggests that the end result is much less fulfilling when it is approached looking for things that were never meant to be there.

And then there is the film’s intertextuality. Keaton, real-life former Batman, is the obvious one, cast here as the former Birdman. And the film is quick to point out to us that this is no coincidence – there is an early scene where Riggan sees a newscast about Robert Downey Jr. who has had his own career resurgence as Iron Man in the Marvel universe – and after an early “accident” at the theater when Riggan is discussing acting replacements with his producer, Jake (Zach Galifianakis), they run through this bit of dialogue:

RIGGAN

Find me an actor. A good actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman...

JAKE

He’s doing the third Hunger Games.

RIGGAN

Michael Fassbender?

JAKE

Doing the prequel to the X-Men prequel.

RIGGAN

What’s his name? Jeremy Renner...

JAKE

Who?

RIGGAN

The... the Hurt Locker guy.

JAKE

Yeah. He’s an Avenger.

RIGGAN

Fuck. They put him in a cape, too?

The film is happy to point out actors that we know by their real names, yet the cast that we are watching are all actors playing characters – not explicitly “character” versions of themselves[7]. Norton’s career has been a bit more eclectic, but it does not feel like much of a stretch to imagine him also playing a caricature of his professional self. Norton has also had his own turn as a movie-superhero. Emma Stone is no exception here playing a sort of anti-Mary-Jane Parker. The film is rife with this sort of textual interplay. And then there is, of course, the short-story-adaptation as play within a movie dynamic[8] as well as the movie critic herself, which sends us spinning into an endless string of commentaries wherein critics are asked to be critical of Iñárritu’s criticism of film[9] criticism[10]. Or perhaps where we are all asked to imagine the relationship of any sort of critic in relation to any sort of artist, and maybe we should all be more Taylor Swift about it indeed.

Throughout the film, we repeatedly catch a glimpse of a quote on Riggin’s mirror: “A thing is a thing not what is said of that thing.” In the penultimate scene, we see Riggan’s production in its first official night. The camera turns to the audience delivering a standing ovation. In the corner of the frame we are shown one person not standing – the theater critic. She turns and leaves the theater as the audience delivers thunderous applause. The curtain rises[11]  on that yet baffling collection of words: “the unexpected virtue of ignorance”.

If I am to deliver my own interpretation, Mr. Iñárritu and company seem to have cobbled together a new sort of cinematic language, not unlike what Greg Michael Gillis[12] has done in the world of music – there is an acknowledgment that the history of the medium has established a common language amongst its audience, and using that common language, new and interesting things can be said. That is the language of Birdman. It is imperfect, but it is damn interesting doing it.

And then there is this: “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies . . . in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.” – David Foster Wallace

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[1] Thus far, Lubezski has only hoisted an Oscar once, for Gravity. Children of Men was narrowly edged by another visual stunner, Pan’s Labyrinth. It feels like a safe bet for to make Lubezki the early favorite to repeat for his work here.

[2] and (I’m 50-50 on this) fairly

[3] See also: Interstellar

[4] After all, my favorite book, Infinite Jest has an ending that I am perhaps equally ambivalent about, yet deeply love because it is full of more moments of individual genius than any other I have ever read. It seems foolish to penalize such works solely on the basis of their narrative cohesion when this sort of art seems barely to even care about it itself.

[5] The week of final rehearsals and previews before a production opens in earnest.

[6] It is no coincidence that the trailers are highlighted by Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”

[7] i.e. Michael Keaton is Riggan Thompson, former Birdman, one – important – degree separated from a caricaturized version of “Michael Keaton, former Batman”.

[8] Let me again remind you that there is no shortage of folks throwing around the words “navel-gazing” as is wont to happen when it comes to any sort of postmodern technique.

[9] Or, I suppose, theater criticism, but you get the point.

[10] A task that they seem to both relish and despise in nearly equal measure.

[11] So to speak.

[12] If you didn’t click through the hyperlink, he’s the guy who goes by “Girl Talk”

Interstellar & the Willing Suspension of Disbelief

** by Tom Johnson

If the last fifteen years of cinema have taught us anything, it’s that a Christopher Nolan film is an event to be paid attention to. He has twice surpassed the thousand million dollar mark, his eight films have grossed over $3.5 billion, and he is perhaps the central figure in the ascent of the blockbuster, with his Batman trilogy doing as much to transform the contemporary big-budget landscape as any other film or series since the Matrix or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

This is the backdrop for Interstellar. You have no doubt seen the countless commercials and know that you are to head to the theater expecting the movie event of the year.

Interstellar begins on an Earth where, in the near future, humanity’s survival prospects have grown desperate. The ratio of nitrogen to oxygen in the atmosphere has taken a turn for the unfavorable, and with it have gone the crops, a new breed freshly stricken with blight each year. Little but corn is left to harvest. The dead and burnt blighted produce leaves in its wake perpetual dust and storms. Society and technology have been thrown into upheaval with little point of sending even the brightest to college as farmers have grown more valuable than engineers, fuel is running out, and everyone drives around in old trucks.

This setting is familiar – America’s dustbowl – and it is well-suited to McConaughey and his Cooper, the salt-of-the-Earth everyman with unyielding devotion to his children, in particular, his young daughter, Murph (played, in her youth, by Mackenzie Foy).

Early on, things become unsettled, pending apocalypse aside. Murph has “ghosts” inhabiting her bedroom and trouble at school – she has gotten into a fist fight with her classmates for the future’s redaction of the moon landing, a fact to which her father, evidently a former NASA pilot, takes exception. The “ghosts” in Murph’s room manifest themselves as gravity that shape dust from a duststorm into coordinates that in an early scene lead Cooper to a mysterious facility where he is tazed by an aggressive talking robot, reminiscent of Kubrick’s obelisk from the opening of 2001, before ultimately meeting Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand and her Professor father, the head of the new NASA – and Cooper’s old boss, played by Michael Caine. Minutes later, there is brief exposition which outlines that Cooper was a former NASA pilot (their best, apparently), and that the team is planning a mission through a recently discovered wormhole into the far reaches of outer space to explore possible life-sustaining planets and either A) Return to Earth to save all of humanity (and Cooper’s children) or B)Colonize the new planet(s) with “bombs” of fertilized eggs, abandoning the humans of Earth, but saving humanity in the process.

Young Murph is upset that her father would elect to abandon her on his quest into outer space, and thus is laid out the central thesis of the film: how fundamental a force is love, and how does such a force manifest across space and time.

After Cooper fails to reconcile with his daughter (but crucially leaves her a wristwatch, highlighting the film’s attempts to deal with the space-time continuum), the crew blasts into space and the film rockets head-long into a tour of special-effects-laden set-pieces. Along the way, we lose two crew members, meet Matt Damon’s Dr. Mann, and hear seemingly endless talk about the space-time continuum that the film will itself very soon disregard, but not before introducing us to a somber Casey Affleck and brilliant Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s now-adult children.

Trying to recap the story beyond the third act is largely futile without it sounding like outright satire, but brace yourself for a truly bizarre climax and Shyamalanian mental-gymnastics.

To me, Interstellar’s great sin is that it loses the audience on the wrong side of the willing suspension of disbelief, a concept that was first outlined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1817, but was perhaps best described by Roger Ebert in the Atlantic back in 1980: “You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories.” It is here that we can most robustly understand why Interstellar is a uniquely unsatisfying film – the movie is most assuredly not a good one; at no point are we absorbed into its fantasy. The plot holes emerge early, and pile on rapidly, and become far too distracting to appreciate the film’s strengths, none of which – not even the much ballyhooed visual effects – can save the muddled script.

Since his probable masterpiece, the Dark Knight, Nolan’s films have been teetering on the brink of failing to convince the audience to suspend their disbelief. Inception was a film of towering ambition with a controversial, if not unsatisfying, resolution. That film, however, reconciled its shortcomings with dazzling special-effects and its mind-bending and delightful structure. It remained narrowly on the right side of the willing suspension of disbelief because its high points were, at the time, so high; its audiences more willing to be absorbed in the fantasy. But even Inception had begun to point markedly toward a direction that Nolan had flirted with when he made The Prestige. As Scott Nye puts it “It's possible that when we talk about plot holes and the clumsy acknowledgment of plot holes, that's what we're really bemoaning: a lack of elegance.” The Dark Knight Rises moved yet further in that direction, eschewing The Dark Knight’s sleekness and moral center instead becoming rather a blunt object. It was, again, a film that succeeded, but only narrowly and in spite of obvious and glaring weaknesses, namely, as Roger Ebert wrote “it needs more clarity and a better villain, but it's an honorable finale.”

Interestingly, I found Interstellar to be almost exactly as bad as the sum-total of the frustrations of Nolan’s oeuvre to date, combined and unabated in one three-hour work. The blame rests largely on the screenplay. Whereas Nolan had allegedly spent ten years writing Inception (and even at that, the film barely remained on the right-side of plausible), here Nolan inherited his brother’s screenplay from a six-year-old project originally to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Nolan’s admirable attempts to reconcile real science with his filmmaking ambitions seem to have added further difficulty to the story’s structure. The result is a script that seems to have been reconstructed piecemeal from various past sources, which feels every bit as Frankensteinian as it sounds. The story never coalesces. The beginning goes on for much too long. The characters bizarrely and abruptly change in ways that feel tied to a presumed ending and not their own internal logic. The adherence to science and the latter set-pieces juxtapose bizarrely with the early rustic setting. And regarding the final, Shyamalanian plot twist, which ties bizarrely back into those “ghosts” that young Murph sees at the very beginning of the film, I have little to say other than that I hated it as much as any single device in recent cinema.

The movie is also loud, almost unbearably so, with a score as distracting as any I can remember. And one of the great disappointments of the film is that though it assembles sucha likeable cast, they struggle to do much with the source material. The whole thing is too incomprehensible to really create much of an emotional core, no matter how much they shout and flail and cry (and oh boy do they cry). Chastain definitively does the best work here, but the peculiarity of her character in the grand scheme of this story makes it feel largely for naught.

All that said, the film is still a Nolan film, and that he is still making huge, ambitious films is better for movies and better for us all, a fact that I will happily acknowledge though I view this particular effort as a failure. There is enough in this film’s ambitions that even though I found it to be uniquely unsatisfying, I would be remiss to call it a total waste of time. I disliked it, but I do genuinely believe that it occupies an important role in the current cinematic landscape, not unlike the way I feel about the music of Kanye West. Whether you love it or you hate it, it is fundamental in the landscape of the current art form. Though I consider Nolan (and longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister) and his ludditish hatred of digital cinema a much closer analogue to Jack White. I suppose that my greatest trepidation in this all is that Nolan seems to work best with some external thing guiding his formidable talent, and the success of his films at the box office is giving him more creative freedom, which has thus far not resulted in better movies.

There are two movies that Interstellar brought to mind that I would recommend highly: be reminded of the visual splendor of Gravity, or watch the subtle, beautiful handling of similar space-time issues in Voices of a Distant Star.