A Chaffering, Most Farraginous Chronicle.

Rating: 6/10 (13 November 2015)

I'm giving this a rating of six because I don't know what else to do. It's a complex congeries of ambition and dramatic, innovative whimsy.
It's difficult to see how "Birdman" could possibly become a popular success. The ordinary Hollywood movie has come to the point where its intended audience has a physical age of about fifteen and a mental age buried somewhere farther back in childhood. And this is challenging, more like literature than film.
The story itself, as far as it can be discerned through all the fantasy, has Michael Keaton, ex hero of the Birdman movies, and my former supporting player in the magnificent, "The Squeeze," now directing a Broadway play, "What People Talk About When They Talk About Love." That title might have been too much even for Ingmar Bergman. The rehearsals involve performers like Naomi Watts and the egomaniacal Edward Norton. It's shaping up to be a disaster.
But on opening night, everything appears to turn out for the best, and at the climax, for added frisson, Keaton shoots part of his nose off with a real bullet. His hospital room is now filled with flowers. The play is a great success. His wrangles with his ex wife and daughter are now resolved. He's put "the voices" behind him. He's happy as a clam so he jumps out the window.
Keaton does fine by the role of the hallucinating and suicidal director, and everyone else measures up. There's no problem with any of the performances. But, man, this is one heavy duty drama. There's not a giggle in it, not a light moment, no beauty. It may borrow its technique from "All That Jazz" but it's message is strictly from Willie Loman.
You see, whenever Keaton is alone, he's at least free of having to argue with someone or slam somebody up against a wall, but he suffers first from deep-throated voices accusing him of being a phony and so forth. And then the source of the voice appears. It's his former role as Birdman, in the typical panoply of the Action Hero, but with black wings. The figure begins to follow him around the streets of New York, snarling at him behind his back.
If you have never seen a Steadycam in use, watch this film because that's about all you'll see. The camera follows, or sometimes precedes, characters as they stalk down long corridors and around corners and up stairs and through doorways. Nothing can stop it. During static scenes, the director displays his fondness for wide angle lenses that turn human faces into those of porpoises.
It's a little annoying to mix up hallucinations and fantasies with what's actually going on in the behavior stream. The first time I recall a serious use of the device was in "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden." Okay. The hallucinated figures were visible on the screen but we could still tell they weren't real. Then came "A Brilliant Mind," far too much of a good thing.
And here we have Keaton committing suicide -- I don't know how many times -- before he takes the final fateful leap from the hospital window. When his daughter rushes to the window and sees his smashed body down on the street, she looks up at the sky and smiles. (No, I don't either.) Unless -- unless -- can it be? There IS no road kill below? We don't get to see it. And -- and maybe Keaton really DID take off into the sky like Birdman. In a movie where anything is possible, anything is possible.
I leave the judgment to the viewer, blanks, subtitle, and all. You probably won't soon forget it.