good acting, nice camera work, lousy story

Rating: 1/10 (23 March 2015)

I need to say that no specific plot details are revealed in this review, but some general observations suggest some plot points. If you haven't seen this movie, this review might spoil it for you, but I'm not recommending that you do see it.
Birdman is an unfortunate mix. I'm a fan of Michael Keaton, so I came to this film with a bit of a bias in his favor. I am pleased to say that I thought his acting was superb. Also, the camera work was interesting, though not original. The continuously moving camera coupled with creative editing and CG work gave the impression of one continuous shot. That also suggested a degree of reality -- seeing events as they happened -- which ultimately was not supported by the story. This movie fails completely in its inability to present itself either as reality or as fantasy. It also fails by creating a protagonist who serves no apparent purpose in the story except to cause us to feel sorry for him.
Keaton plays a former actor in super hero movies who is despondent about becoming too old to maintain that role, which apparently has become indistinguishable from his self-image. While despondence is a great dramatic hook, we usually expect a good story to present us with despair that arises over something that would matter to most of us, for instance a runner who loses the use of his legs, an architect who goes blind, an employee who gets fired. It's troubling that many viewers can identify with a man whose despair arises from his self-image as an aging super hero. While we don't usually hold films to the standards of the best classical dramas, those Greek and Shakespearean plays set some guidelines that have worked for centuries now in providing solid entertainment. Those guidelines are nowhere evident in Birdman.
Although we see traces of fantasy throughout the film in Keaton's delusions, we are led to believe they are simply his personal hallucinations, particularly since no one else ever sees them. That casts the film in the role of a reality tale. However, in the final few minutes we are presented with a fantasy scene that is witnessed by someone else, suggesting that we have been duped and that the reality of all that preceded those final moments is in question. That's not good story telling; it's only confusion and audience manipulation.
This film contains two major gimmicks that were clearly intended to let some viewers think they were seeing something smart and clever, while actually they were only experiencing dishonest writing. Norman Rockwell once said if a magazine cover he was painting wasn't working, he'd add a dog. If it still wasn't working he'd put a bandage on the dog's foot. Here we got the dog and the bandage. One of those gimmicks is the ending described above. The other preceded it and involved Keaton doing something while on stage that served no useful purpose in the story except to provide some suspense, until the inevitable moment finally arrived.
I have no argument with morality plays and with pure fantasy. Maleficent is a recent example. That story used fantasy to convey some views about human relationships. There was no confusion between fantasy and reality, and the story was driven by a need to resolve a wrong, a resolution which occurred predictably but in a satisfying manner at the end. Birdman doesn't even come close.