Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Risborough, Zach Galifianakis, Lindsay Duncan, Jeremy Shamos, Kenny Chin, Jamahl Garrison-Lowe, Katherine O’ Sullivan, Damian Young, Keenan Shimizu, Akiro Ito, Natalie Gold, Merritt Weaver, Michael Siberry, Clark Middleton, Amy Ryan, William Youmans, Paula Pell, David Fierro, Hudson Flynn, Warren Kelly, Joel Marsh Garland.
Some films are just so perfect that the ideology behind them, the message they are meant to represent, doesn’t matter. What matters is the substance, the overall feel in which they leave the audience fulfilled and more content than being told they could eat whatever they wanted over the festive period, it wouldn’t show up as weight gained on the scales at home.
How do you go from international mega star to trying to prove your worth on Broadway? To have the spectre of cinematic highs as a costumed crime fighter hanging over you like Damocles’ Sword poised over your body and gently pricking you each time you breath, is one that many an actor to have appeared in a comic book adaptation will not fail to understand. For Riggan, the presence of his 80s and 90s alter ego, the lack of suitable candidates to be the other leading man in a self penned work based upon an American legend’s writing, a daughter who is on the edge of self-destruction and all manner of things going wrong in the theatre, is enough to have the doubts starting, when Birdman starts to whisper in his ear about donning the suit one more time, it’s only a matter of time before self assurance goes out of the window.
Birdman is one of those rare films in which a cast thrown together, which in other circumstances would fail quicker than the latter stages of the Carry On series, shines brighter than a neon sign above a sold out theatre on cold clear night in December. It should be impossible to think of Michael Keaton and Edward Norton producing two of the best performances on screen likely to be seen in 2015 and ones that excel beyond belief. It is not just the male egos that get stroked inside the theatre confines as Emma Stone continues on an upward path and Naomi Watts brings to the screen some of that wonderful early promise she showed and in which working alongside Bill Murray in St. Vincent and with Edward Norton and Michael Keaton in Birdman has re-ignited a passion which seemed arguably lost between Mulholland Drive and the aforementioned St. Vincent.
Where the film really drives home the relationship between artist and critic is the conversation in the bar between Michael Keaton’s Riggan and Lindsay Duncan’s New York Times Art Critic Tabitha. The back and forth nature in which the critic openly declares hostility for the less artistic of actors is one that somehow captures the life that critics can be seen to live in. To the actor, they can be seen as almost parasitic, capable of killing a career before even the first night and to place this long standing belief into a film is one that should be applauded fully.
Birdman is not just a cleverly written, exceptionally shot and beautifully realised film, it creates a new high for others to try and emulate. For Michael Keaton especially Birdman represents perhaps a new chapter in which the last twenty years of being overlooked for some of the better roles to come along will now be thankfully forgotten, for if it ever needed to be stated, Mr. Keaton was one of the most bankable and creative energies in cinema, now perhaps he will get the credit he has been overdue.
The world of theatre, with all its insecurities and crushing highs and bottomless lows has never been more entertaining. Birdman is a piece of cinema history.
Ian D. Hall