Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

USA
directed by: Alejandro González Iñárritu
written by: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo
starring: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton
seen: 22nd June, 2017

Very uncomfortably suggestive story about a mental illness, insane mostly because no person close to Birdman notices it or is aware of it. That is, to me, the main source of the titular ignorance, although I fail to see anything virtuous about it at all.

The intense shadowing of his main character doesn't allow the director to put much other work into the fictional world around Birdman, and also forces him to condense many personal crises of many different people to one time and one place, which is always a bit suspicious and a bit too convenient for my taste. But: The overall tempo is so riveting that I'm immediately forgetting my objections and forgiving them in order to enjoy more and more of this frantic dance.

The actors really shine here. I was even impressed by Ed Norton's performance, and he's an actor I almost loathe in his earlier roles. Recently I say him take up more comedic roles and in my eyes that suits him better. Here, he's almost a caricature of himself and marvelous at that. The camera work and musical arrangements are coming straight from my soul, or should I say straight for my soul to tear it into a lot of tiny pieces. And that's why I am so sorry to say that I was gravely disappointed by the ending.

The film forecasts a lot of notions as it goes along and most of these notions eventually turn out to be right, or the truth. I would even say that we know everything right from the first shots. There's no place for mysteries or fake hopes. The key to this storytelling is intensity. That climaxes during the finale on the theatre stage. And what follows is, in my eyes, a demeaning epilogue to all the madness we witnessed before. It's predictable and it talks way too much. It's more like a draft of what the final scene should look like, a draft that still needs a lot more careful work to throw out the ballast and keep only the shots that are necessary and the words that are necessary. The awful newspaper waving is a drag that even the eyes of Emma Stone cannot balance out.

 -"A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing."