Headache-inducing self-impressed babble

Rating: 2/10 (30 December 2015)

Last year, while waiting in line at the concession stand, a film let out disgorging a healthy number of attendees discussing it. Among the comments I heard were "garbage," "trash," "pretentious twaddle," "utter nonsense," "waste of time" and "I had no idea it would be that bad," all uttered from different attendees. My curiosity aroused as to what could have generated such ill will, I took a gander at what was playing in that theater and was surprised to see it was the critical darling (and future Oscar winner) Birdman. After all the accolades, I decided to catch this little gem on cable and found out that the disgruntled comments were more accurate than the accolades showered from elites.
Birdman (subtitled The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance because it just sounds so fancy) is the meandering tale of Riggan, a former star of a blockbuster superhero film franchise now a wash-out (played by former Batman Michael Keaton, cue the irony), who is making a desperate stab to prove his acting bona fides and relevancy on the Great White Way in a new play. Naturally, nothing goes the way it should resulting in what appears to be a grandiose mental breakdown. Obstacles and complications include Riggan's ex-wife Amy Ryan, unpredictable Method actor co-star Edward Norton, Riggan's obnoxious lawyer/manager Zach Galifianakis, needy actress Naomi Watts, Riggan's burnt-out daughter cum assistant Emma Stone and vitriolic critic Lindsay Duncan, who is determined to destroy Riggan and the show...apparently just because she can.
Birdman is the kind of bilge that film critics, intellectuals and industry insiders salivate over because it so lovingly panders to them by insisting that only they know quality entertainment and everyone else are too mentally stunted to get it. It proclaims that it is talking about deep emotional issues and things of great import, but it is truthfully narcissitically in awe of its own self-importance. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu may be an artist, but his film is a disjointed, long-winded overacted mess that wants to cast barbs at viewers of popular mainstream films while coddling the art house crowd. It has nothing new or fresh to say, and not for one moment are we allowed to forget that we are watching a film-a VERY IMPORTANT film. A film bloated with its own self-aggrandizement and ludicrous flights of fancy. It tries so hard to sell the viewer on how brilliant it is that I thought someone may have left an Oscar voting ballot under my seated ass.
Much like we are never allowed to forget we are watching a film and thus are held at arms length from these bizarre characters, we are equally never allowed to forget that we are witnessing actors acting. Or perhaps I should clarify, we are watching ACTING!!! Every performance is rife with hostility and melodrama and pathos. They are pitched to the rafters and the scenery trembles in terror as it is chewed like a pack of piranhas has been loosed. The fact that Norton and Stone actually manage some fine moments is astounding. Everyone else blends into the acting cacophony until it becomes an indiscernible wall of noise.
No one more so than acclaimed lead actor Keaton. Keaton has worked precious little since his departure from the Batman series and when he has shown up it has been to mixed results. There is an irony of casting him in this role, but little more. Here he screams, he cries, he froths, he babbles, he runs around in his undies, he careens under the power of his own ego from one scene of hysterical overacting to the next. The fact that Inarritu stocks the film with seemingly endless internal fantasy sequences makes it even worse. Note to Keaton and the writers of this mess, Christian Bale was able to be the most memorable on screen Batman, while still doing Oscar-caliber prestige films and winning one himself. Stop blaming bad film choices and uneven performances on franchises and start looking inward.
The film itself takes punches at popular culture, the Hollywood system and the low prurient tastes of the masses, but is itself ultimately even more tiresome and vacuous than the entertainment it disdains because it comes packaged in such a thick carapace of deluded pretension. It plays like a really bad vanity piece. Even worse, it witlessly slogs past several endings and keeps going becoming more asinine by the frame. By the time Keaton takes a firearm and tries to commit suicide onstage one hopes it will be over, but then it goes onward to yet an even more tedious ambiguous ending that it hopes will inspire people to fervently discuss what actually happened and what did Emma Stone see out the window at the end. Unfortunately, more will probably be content to leave such discussion in the theater and escape from these endlessly yammering characters and the foolish film they inhabit, than debate what intentions the self-impressed screenplay had in its final moments.
A virtual cinematic definition of the emperor wearing no clothes.