Best film about an aging artist's career reboot on Broadway? "All About Eve" still in the lead!

Rating: 5/10 (29 April 2015)

I liked Iñárritu much better when he was turning out heavyweight art-house flix like "21 Grams" and "Biútiful." In his earlier films he didn't hesitate to take on XXL themes like chaos theory ("if a butterfly flaps its wings...") and globalization; the results were sometimes pretentious and incoherent, but they weren't boring. In his big US crossover move, he narrows the focus a bit-high vs. pop culture, Broadway vs. Hollywood, print vs. social media-and in the end he seems to be playing to an even tinier audience of showbiz insiders and fanboys (see "Trivia" on this page for a long list of smirky inside jokes and gossipy riffs on the cast's defining roles and personal quirks).
After a promising early scene in which Method fanatic Mike Shiner (Ed Norton) shows struggling director Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) how to cut a few lines from Raymond Caver's famously laconic prose (I guess that's an injoke too, but it's a pretty good scene), the film completely loses momentum. We couldn't get too interested in Riggan's high vs. low dilemma or the brittle backstage romances, and Inárritu's trademark magic realist touches (very effective in "Biútiful") just seemed pointless-e.g., Riggan uses his telekinetic powers mostly to trash his dressing room. The final question the film raises-whether Riggan has lapsed into self-destructive psychosis or achieved transcendence and taken to the skies-is of course left unanswered.
Maybe the rigid shooting schedule and the showoff cinematography (which apparently didn't allow for many retakes) put too much pressure on the cast; only Emma Stone seems really comfortable in her role. Long story short, "Birdman" was a major disappointment and a bit of a chore to sit through; the only time I felt any honest emotion emerging from the murk was when the film was quoting someone else-Keaton reciting the last lines of the Carver story or a few quiet bars of a Mahler song suddenly becoming audible (amid bursts of infernal drumming) on the soundtrack...