Strange, maddening, and seriously overrated.

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2015)

There's no doubt in my mind Birdman will divide audiences. You will either go with its heightened sense of reality, or disconnect with it entirely.
Filmed and edited in a "single-shot" style, Birdman demands for your complete attention, and never gives you a moment to breathe or look away. It feels very much like a play. It has undeniably brilliant moments, with fantastic performances, impressive camera work, and directed with a great eye for detail. The performances are truly the highlight, with Keaton and Stone delivering career bests.
Keaton in particular, turns in a brilliant performance as the deluded Riggan, an actor washed up and hungry for artistic recognition. In fact the entire cast is great, and there is an urgency is nearly every scene that really captures the chaotic behind the scenes atmosphere. It puts a harsh mirror onto the art scene, where you feel trapped in the business, where the only choices seem to be selling out, or staying with egoistic actors and the pretentious critics who judge your earnest work by spitting on it. Much like a reflection of what is actually happening in the movie industry now. Blockbuster franchises like Marvel thrive while indie movies have a much harder time to survive.
Iñárritu commits so much into the style of the film, that it becomes rather joyless. Everything impresses on a technical level, but never resonates. It succeeds in putting you into the shortsighted view of Riggan by essentially almost never leaving the Theater set and outside street for the entire movie, but it robs the movie of any scale or sense of consequences. Everything felt small. All we see is the set, the stage, and the streets outside the theater, and for a movie that asks you to never look away, its became surprisingly visually bland as time went on. The tradeoff is in the immersion factor, which Birdman absolutely nails.
At the end of the day, i cant say i enjoyed of Birdman. Parts of it has incredible emotional resonance, but for a majority of it, i appreciated its technical accomplishments, yet it felt cold at its core by the end of it.
The brief flashes of dark comedy give it a strange tonal imbalance, with some of the fantasy sequences serving as the foundation for the final shot, which ends on the now clichéd "art-house ambiguity" shot. The performances carry it up, and i suspect its a film that art students would gladly study over, picking apart its themes and marveling at its technical prowess. And rightfully so, it should be applauded for that.
As a viewing experience, its decent if you want to try something new, andlike art-house films. And Keaton's soulful performance alone is worth the price of admission, but everything else falls flat and feels empty.