A flawed work of genius?

Rating: Null/10 (26 March 2015)

I managed to catch "Birdman" while it was still on the big screen but, by the time I did this, the movie had already garnered four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Most of the Academy's voters are actors and this is very much a film about acting and actors. If American cinema-goers had voted for Best Picture, "American Sniper" would have won hands-down and has taken more money that all the other Best Picture nominations combined. I admired both works - but they could hardly be more different.
While "AS" covers a lot of ground, both in terms of geography and time, the action in "Birdman" largely takes place in a New York theatre and, although the narrative traverses several weeks, the shooting contrives to give the impression that, in the main, this was a single take (you have to look much closer than in Hitchcock's "Rope" to spot the 16 actual cuts). If "AS" is about a man that most Americans see as a hero struggling with his inner demons, then "Birdman" is about an actor who used to play a superhero devoured by his demons. One of the many delights of the film is the delicious irony that the eponymous superhero is played by Michael Keaton who, of course, once portrayed another black-clad, caped superhero.
But while Keaton gives a tour de force performance which gained him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (it went instead to Eddie Redmayne), like any good play this is an ensemble piece with a slew of fine thespian displays. Leading the pack is Edward Norton, but the young female stars - Naomi Watts, Emma Stone and Britain's Andrea Riseborough - are all impressive. And both the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and the jazz drum music from Antonio Sanchez add to this marvellously accomplished work.
If one person has to be singled out in assessing "Birdman, it must be the Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu who directed, produced and co-wrote the movie. Maybe, just maybe, however, the whole thing is too artful, knowing, contrived and ultimately - dare I say it - pretentious. So many lines of dialogue, so many scenes, shots and props, can be seen as alluding to another character or another film or capable of several interpretations. Indeed the title itself involves an ambiguous sub-title and even then the parentheses do not enclose the word 'or'. Perhaps this is a flawed work of genius that, while never less than utterly absorbing, tries just a little too hard to be so clever.