Birdman

Year 7, Day 21 - 1/21/15 - Movie #1,921

BEFORE: The next best film to watch, for linking purposes, would be "Moonrise Kingdom", since that's another Wes Anderson film and shares about 8 actors with "The Grand Budapest Hotel".  And I tried again and again to put them next to each other, I really did.  I need to link to Bruce Willis later this week, so I'll get to the other Wes Anderson film in a couple days.

But the reason for putting this one here is that it seems to be all about the creative process, and I'm tying that in with finally getting some work done on my own screenplay.  I've been working toward this ever since one of my two jobs went away - the holidays are over now, and I've got no more excuses.  I went in to do the year-end accounting and wrap things up, and my old boss asked me how the writing was going.  When I said I hadn't been able to find the time, because of so many distractions at home, he said I could come in and write at my old office.  I initially said no, but after thinking about it, I realized it might be the only way I could get some writing in.  If I make the trip in to the city and don't write, I'll feel like I've wasted the day, so there's my motivation, hopefully.  

Plus, when someone offers you free office space, a desk and a computer to use, why not take it?  I can get any food delivered via Seamless, there are plenty of places to get beverages and Tums (which every writer needs, right?) and I can always run an errand or two as needed if I need a break.  So I went in yesterday and got about 15 pages written, which is 15 more pages than I've been able to write in the last 18 months.  So I might as well make this part of a weekly Tuesday routine, until further notice.

THE PLOT: A washed up actor, who once played an iconic superhero, battles his ego and attempts to recover his family, his career and himself in the days leading up to the opening of a Broadway play.
 
AFTER: Watching "Birdman" was my reward to myself after finally getting some writing done, and I don't think I could have chosen a more appropriate film, because it's all about motivation, what drives actors, and by extension all creative types, to strive, move forward and seek new challenges.  In that way creative people are like sharks, if they don't keep swimming forward, they'll die.  Or become irrelevant, which is worse.  

This is NOT, however, a superhero film.  It's a film about someone having been in a superhero film, and by this film's own rules (as seen prominently in a note on a dressing room mirror), if it's about the thing, then it is NOT the thing itself.  It's an acknowledgement that actors live in a post-Dark Knight, post-Avengers world, and there's been a shift in the way that stories are told.  If you haven't been in a superhero film by now, you may have missed the boat.  But ironically, many of the people who have been in the big movie franchises have struggled to get OUT of them.

And when you're dealing with creative types, and the moving forward process, you realize that no one is usually content - film actors want to be stage actors, stage actors want to be on TV, and morons want to be on reality shows.  As Paul Simon sang, "Everyone loves the sound of a train in the distance" and later in the same song, "The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains."  

But singers, like actors and writers, are basically liars.  Well, they lie so that they can expose a greater truth, I suppose.  Or evoke an emotion that supports that truth.  The reason I'm glad I started writing today is because I was slowly becoming something worse than a liar, and that's a fraud.  How long can you walk around saying you're working on something, when you haven't touched it in 18 months? 

Anway, back to actors - there are essentially two types, which are represented here by the two male leads, played by Michael Keaton and this week's featured actor, Edward Norton.  One school of acting is the "pretending" school, which again is a form of lying, and it involves memorizing lines, thinking about the ways a character would react to things IF he was real, and then trying to support that with the proper facial expression, or a well-timed tear, you get the idea.  But because this style of acting is easier to see through, especially if it's not done well, a lot of actors follow the "less is more" philosophy.  Rather than produce the wrong expression, or the wrong emotion, they feel it's better to produce none at all, and let their clothing, or the make-up or hair, make a point. 

The other school is the "method" school, which states that the best way to portray a character is to go out and do the things that character is supposed to do - learn to play guitar, build a log cabin by hand, lose 100 pounds, sleep with the leading lady.  Because this tends to produce a very real experience, and the emotions that go with them, it's often confused with the "more is more" philosophy.  Hey, if you play a marathon runner and you run a real marathon, you can act as exhausted as you want, as far as I'm concerned.  But collapsing as you cross the finish line and requiring hospitalization is not recommended. 

Either way, you've got to deal with that voice in your head, the representation of your own self-doubt.  I know it well, because it's the thing that often gets in my way.  "I don't need to start writing today, do I?  Wouldn't I rather just go for a walk and have lunch?  Even if I did write something, it would probably be shitty anyway, so why bother?"  Keaton's character here is constantly fighting with this inner voice, the one that's telling him about all the mistakes he's making, and is continuing to make, that his enterprise in adapting and starring in a Raymond Carver play is a huge waste of time.  Sometimes that voice is represented by the Birdman character he once played, but the thing I really found confusing here is that at the start of the film Birdman represented self-doubt, but near the end of the film Birdman sort of represented acceptance and freedom.  I'm not sure where and why the change occurred. 

The best part, and it's a small but meaningful part in the film, is when he takes a theater critic to task, after she's vowed to give his play a terrible review and force it to close, even though she hasn't seen it yet.  She can't stand the thought of a "Hollywood" actor coming to Broadway and having the conceit to put on a stage play.  (Gee, Orson Welles did it...)  It's perhaps appropriate that someone criticize a critic for being critical, but on the other hand, what did you expect?  That's what they do, they criticize.  It's right there in their name.  

This is why I've said, again and again, that I am not a critic, or even a reviewer, which sounds slightly better.  Most critics are just that, they label and compare, and they're not DOERS.  I'll make an exception for the late Roger Ebert, because he wrote a few screenplays, so he earned the right to talk about the mechanics of what makes a good or bad story.  But most just reduce a film or a play to a series of things they liked and things they didn't like, and you can't really hold anyone accountable for that, any more than you can say someone's wrong for liking the color blue and hating pink.  

On the other hand, I just watch a film and then say what's on my mind, whether it's directly related to the film or not.  I can go off on wild tangents, and I'm not beholden to anyone to like a certain thing or think a certain way.  If I don't like the mechanics of the way something was written or filmed, I have that right because I've been in filmmaking, in one way or another, for 25 years - I can say, "Well, I wouldn't have done it THAT way," even if the truth is that I probably wouldn't ever have gotten around to doing that at all.  

My boss was eligible for two Oscar nominations this month (I take credit only for filling out all the necessary paperwork), one for an animated short and one for an animated feature.  He didn't get either, but it's understandable because his work is usually under the radar or considered outside the mainstream.  When the noms don't come through, his attitude is "Well, this film was better because it had more heart", or "That film had a better story than mine."  This used to confuse me, because if he knew which films were more likely to get nominated by the Academy, why couldn't he just make a film like THAT, just to get a nomination.  Ah, but then he would be playing their game instead of his own, he'd be making the films that he thinks people want him to make, rather than the films he really wants to make, or the films that he thinks people NEED to see.  If you're just in the game to get accolades or fame, then maybe you're not an artist, you're a whore.

I want to take a minute to admire the technical aspect of this film - it gives off the appearance of being filmed in one long take (OK, maybe two or three) but since I know the mechanics of it, I know that's impossible.  I think I caught a couple of the transitions, sneakily done, but others just made me go "WHOA" as they demonstrated camera shots or angles that as far as I knew, seemed completely impossible.  The St. James theater is an unexpected star here, as the cameraman follows people in and around its corridors and backstage rooms, up into the rafters and sometimes out its doors and into the streets.  And because of the long takes, the actors had to memorize very long sections of the script, and hit very precise marks - hmm, that sounds almost like a stage production.

ASIDE: If you watch the ending of "Peggy Sue Got Married", there's a scene in a hospital room with a very large mirror.  The camera pulls back from the scene, and is somehow not reflected in that mirror.  As a teen I watched this scene, again and again, until I figured out how they shot this.  The mirror was really a hole in the wall (or a pane of clear glass) and on the other side was another room, with the same furniture and actors who closely resembled Nicolas Cage, Kathleen Turner and Helen Hunt, dressed the same, but staged in reverse, to appear as the mirror image.  Their movements didn't exactly match the actors in the main room, which is how I figured it out.  There are a couple of shots like this in "Birdman", where somehow the camera is not reflected in a dressing-room mirror, and in such close quarters, that should be impossible.  I don't think they used the same trick as in "Peggy Sue" - these days tech people have probably figured out how to digitally remove the camera from the final image.

This film is also about acknowledging the world we live in - yesterday, after watching "The Grand Budapest Hotel", I was bemoaning the loss of a bygone, more civilized era.  And this is the flip-side of that.  We live in a post-Facebook, post-Twitter world, where not only is everyone a critic, but they also have places to do that.  How many views or likes something got is often more important than whether something is "good" or "important", if those words even still apply.  Who cares if you're an actor, isn't it more important to be a celebrity?  Why don't you have more followers?  Because I'm not a cult leader, that's why.  If you're coming to me for advice or insight, man, you must be in trouble.  

There's that voice of self-doubt again, but you know what?  After I wrote for a few hours today, revising my treatment and then composing 15 pages of actual dialogue, my head felt kind of emptied out, and the inner voice was quiet.  And that's how you beat it back. 

Oh, yeah, the rating.  I had high hopes for this one, I thought maybe it would be a really bold, innovative think-piece, but it's also pretty obtuse and occasionally confusing.  Maybe over time I'll regard it the way I do "Brazil", because in some ways it reminds me of that film, but it just didn't bowl me over the way an actual superhero film tends to do.  I gotta be me and speak my truth.

Also starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "The Paper"), Emma Stone (last seen in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2"), Zach Galifianakis (last seen in "The Hangover Part III"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "The Impossible"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Win Win"), Andrea Riseborough, with cameos from Bill Camp (last seen in "Rounders"), Jackie Hoffman.

RATING: 7 out of 10 previews