Birdman on a Wire

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2018)

Part backstage drama and part study of an actor having a nervous breakdown, (plus that awful alternative title in parentheses) you might be tempted to give this particular film a miss. Incredibly, there actually are super-hero sequences too in a movie which swings between imagination and reality, fantasy and the mundane at will, taking the viewer along with it in its wake. This latter is accomplished by the acting skills of the cast and in particular the free flowing directorial style with continuous camera work tracking the action wherever it goes, imperceptibly speeding up timelines and giving a fly-on-the-wall insight into the tawdry lives of a group of actors trying to break a play on Broadway.
Central to it all is Michael Keaton, cunningly cast as an ex-movie star typecast from blockbuster movies he starred in twenty five years before as the super-hero Birdman, now trying to establish himself as a serious actor by adapting a Ray Carver short story into a play. Actually, said play looks absolutely awful but putting that to one side it's all about the characters' interaction, including his smart-aleck daughter who Keaton employs as his gopher, a maverick big-name big-headed actor who he recruits to boost the play's prospects, his plate-spinning manager desperate for the show to succeed as well as his former super-powered alter ego who makes Harvey-like appearances and utterances urging him to jettison the present.
I liked the way off-beat humour kept puncturing the so-serious conversation pieces which elsewhere take up so much of the screen time, such as both Keaton and Edward Norton as superstar thespian Mike Shiner at different times caught in scenes unashamedly donning only their tighty-whiteys, Norton's character becoming aroused in a live bedroom scene and Keaton's final breakdown when he regresses completely into his super hero guise.
The long-takes and relentlessly mobile camera work is wonderfully inventive and even though there is a sense that there's not really much of a story to tell here and occasionally style overtakes content. Keaton as Riggen Thompson plays the falling apart lead trying to pull himself and his play together. He demonstrates considerable range but like most of the parts here it is flashily written and screaming out for official recognition, which it duly got at the Oscars and more.
I enjoyed the film and loved the depiction of New York's Broadway, especially as I've just returned from a first time visit to that very part of the Big Apple. I still have my suspicions as to whether the film will age well and really stands up in terms of content but no doubt actors and directors, budding and established will get a real kick out of it. Not being either, maybe I thought I occasionally saw instead the wires, smoke and mirrors propping it up.