When I saw the trailer for this film, I was hooked yet I had no idea of what this movie was going to be about. I think the thing that made me want to see it the most was that it was starring Michael Keaton, an actor that I really like and haven't really seen him in much in a while (at least in movies that I have seen since he was in the remake of Robocop). It is really difficult to say whether or not I had any expectations of what this movie was even when I looked up a brief synopsis. The only real thing I could get from that little tidbit was that Keaton's character, Riggan Thompson, was kind of a exaggerated version of Keaton himself, a guy who got his big break starring in a series of superhero films but afterwards was never really able to make that transition into something more substantial. Riggan decides to do something different by writing, directing and starring in a play adapted from a work of writer Raymond Carver's, who had turned out to be the reason why Riggan wanted to become an actor in the first place.
One thing that I should talk about right away when it comes to this is the camerawork and editing, since the whole movie, aside from a few moments, looks as if it is all shot in one continuous take. With all of the movement on screen and the length of the scenes, this had to be one of the most challenging things to do (or at least do well) and it is not the kind of shots where you can really tell where the cuts are, such as if there is a black screen that last for a few frames just to disguise it. Due to how well the camerawork flows from this kind of trickery, the people who work on lighting and stuff really had their work cut out for them since even a little amount of mess up could screw up the flow. For things like this as well, the actors have to get a ton of credit for being able to perform as well as they do in all of that time that the scene is going on.
The acting itself is really wonderful as everyone seems to be at their best in this movie. Keaton is fantastic playing Riggan, a man whose desire to not be forgotten has manifested into some sort of delusion where he appears to have some sort of power to manipulate the world with superpowers and reeks of desperation as the play has left him broke, leaving him in an all or nothing type of situation. There is also Edward Norton, another actor who can be really good but I also haven't really seen him in much either lately, maybe being even more of an exaggeration of his real life persona as Mike Shiner, an actor who can only feel alive on stage and will do anything to improve his work even if he alienates everyone around him, which does lead to a lot of the film's humor due to his not give a fuck attitude when it comes to things outside of the play. Zach Galifianakis also does a really good job playing Riggan's lawyer/friend Jake, who wants the play to succeed at any costs (although maybe not to the extent that Thompson goes to at the end of the movie, which I will get to later). The rest of the cast does great as well, such as Emma Stone as Riggan's daughter Sam who works as her dad's assistant and Naomi Watts whose character Lesley is also a first time Broadway actor who really does not want things to screw up.
What I guess is the main theme of the story is how people just want to find their place in the world, to leave a mark or to make a difference at a point in their lives, which is the conflict that follows Riggan throughout. He does have a voice in his head, a manifestation of Birdman, speaking to him that tries to put him in his place and remind him of the real reasons why he is doing this, not because he believes that he can be good at this but that he wants to have people notice him again. That drive does come to a halt on many occasions like in a scene where he and his daughter get into a fight where she tells him that like the rest of the world, he doesn't matter, which deepens his feelings of irrelevancy. There is also where he comes by an article which has Mike being interviewed and taking Riggan's story about Raymond Carver as his own, which Thompson believes is taking away the spotlight from what is supposed to be his own passion project.
Another thing that manages to get some sort of humor is all of the times that the scene at the end of the play, where the lead confronts his wife having an affair with another man and proceeds to commit suicide after lamenting about how he doesn't exist, which does make the play itself more of a personal story to Riggan than expected since both he and the character he plays both feel a sense of isolation and no sense of place in the world and having no way to deal with that. But back to the topic, each preview screening ends up becoming a mess for multiple reasons, such as Mike getting into a drunk tirade or Riggan being locked out of the theater with only his underwear and a wig as his clothing. There is always this sense throughout that the play could fail at any moment which is exacerbated when Thompson meets up with Tabitha, a theater critic who doesn't like him and has her mind set on giving his play the worst review imaginable no matter what the outcome turns out to be, just to spite Riggan and everything she believes he stands for.
Which comes to the ending (SPOILERS btw), where now no matter what he does at this point, Riggan is going to fail due to the power that Tabitha has as a critic. This leads him to brandish a real gun on opening night for the climax of the play, where he tries to give it everything he has, knowing that this will most likely be the last performance he gives. He also has the idea where he might have his last chance at relevancy, if he is able to give the audience the most realistic way to portray a suicide on stage by actually trying to kill himself, so even if the play turns out to be a failure, that moment will always be remembered. After that, the audience is so dumbfounded, wondering whether or not he actually did it yet they applause it with a standing ovation. It turns out though that he missed his shot, only shooting off his nose and the play turns out to be a success. This was pointed out to me by someone else who watched it that it felt kind of out of place for the movie and that the ending turned out to be too happy. I can kind of see that and yet this does remind me of another movie that had a similar type of ending situation, that being Taxi Driver, which also has some similarities to Birdman when given some thought. Taxi Driver at the end, after Travis kills off Sport and the other guys at the underage den of prostitutes to save Iris, leaving him mortally wounded, has something more upbeat where Travis is treated as a hero and garners some praise from the community even if he really is not a good person at heart, just the circumstances paint him as one for the time being, leaving one to wonder if the end of that movie is really the dying thoughts of Travis. Riggan does have somewhat of a similar story, where instead of becoming a tragic martyr of the acting craft, he is praised for his acting style, dubbed "Super Realism" and is showered with the attention he has desired since the beginning of the movie. That last minute though could lead to that this could all be a delusion of Riggan's right before he dies but I might be laying on the Taxi Driver comparisons a bit too much.
So what is with the subtitle The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? If I had to say, maybe it could apply to Riggan and his delusion of how he wants to believe he is compared to what he knows he really is but maybe I am thinking about this too much. All I know is that this is one of those movies that comes once in a long while that kind of reinvigorates the desire of the art of film and why we as an audience watches movies. I know this is one of those that might be one of my favorite movies ever and easily my favorite of the year so far. I would like to know other people's thoughts on the material to see if people like it as much as I do.
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