What Birdman teaches you about art and artists
Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is only the latest film to showcase his brashness. Over the course of his still-developing career, the director has already built an oeuvre for the ages, taking risks, not just with stories that are refractions on love, loss and death, but also with filming techniques. In 2003's 21 Grams, an accident changes the lives of its central characters but the story derives its raw power notfrom the event, which we learn of early on, but the sudden jumps that the editing induces into the narrative so that the film becomes an emotional treasure hunt for the viewer as he tries to place the pieces together.
Iñárritu perfected this technique in Babel (2006) which was set in Morocco, Mexico and Japan. A couple faces annihilation in Africa; a woman must give up her identity for the sake of a better future; and a lonely teenager looks for precocious love. Every story, while deeply particular, is interwoven in Iñárritu's hands and speaks to unifying themes across time and distance.
Iñárritu has also been a famously eclectic director. His breakout work, 2000's Amores Perros, was set in his native Mexico. 2010's Biutifulis perhaps his most gut-wrenching film-bringing alive the horrors of illegal immigration against a magical realist backdrop.
In Birdman, running in cinemas currently, Iñárritu shifts his gaze again, and brings us his most fully American film to date. We are at Broadway, with Michael Keaton's Riggan Thomson, who is mounting an adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Thomson is an ageing actor whose most popular role was in the past: as Birdman, a caped crusader who saves the world in the tradition of comic book heroes. He made three solid Birdman movies but declined to work in a fourth.
We meet Thomson as he struggles with the fact, and subsequent ravages, of choosing art over commerce. In hoping to prove to the world that he is a real artist he has launched himself on a path that is lonely and fraught with despair. His distant daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), thinks little of him and the world at large will not let him forget his Birdman avatar.
The setting is the nerve-wracking world of elite New York theatre. Dissatisfied with the actor for a pivotal role, Thomson chances upon Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a method actor who will go to any length, including ruining a running production, to give space to the performer in him. If one can momentarily forget that this is an Iñárritu film and observe dispassionately the shenanigans between Thomson and Shiner, one may even locate some laugh-out humour. But the film's central question is whether the artist owes greater allegiance to his craft or his sanity. Thomson suffers an unending private inferno - the Birdman having turned into an albatross around his neck.
It speaks to him constantly, goading him to return to a life of blazing glory. Even as he makes a desperate attempt to prove his artistic worth, Thomson knows he is insuperably unsuited to the effort. He operates in a culture scene that is completely different to one he is accustomed to. Twitter determines the popularity, ergo merit, of an actor. The New York art world considers Hollywood trash. In one scene theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson (a menacingly icy Lindsay Duncan) tells Thomson she will destroy his play because he is one of the "entitled, selfish, spoiled children, blissfully untrained, unversed and unprepared to even attempt real art." One wonders if this is Iñárritu's own damning indictment of the studio-driven Hollywood machine.
How does one distinguish high art from its lesser variants? Via Thomson, Iñárritu channels this age-old question but curiously presents us a portrait so drenched in pain that one is not sure where his own proclivities lie. Incorporating magical realism, Iñárritu takes us on joy ride through the streets of New York as Thomson flies past tall buildings and a cheering audience in his quest for peace. It is a most powerful scene because it perfectly encapsulates both the anxiety of the artist to do quality work and the refusal of the world at large to acknowledge that need once he has sold out.
The movie does not reconcile the dichotomy at its heart but gives us a glimpse into its likely resolution towards the end. That is when art merges with life and deliberations on art, on the wish to leave a solid legacy behind are finally held in thrall to that other, important mother lode: the desire to be happy.