Thanks, I Hate It: Birdman

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is exactly the kind of movie that wins an Oscar for Best Picture. Smug, tedious, shallowly preoccupied with the making of art as an endeavor at once grand and grubby, and proud of its technical conceits even as the practical and fictional limits of its faux single-shot format are stretched far past the point of believability. Why structure a film as a single shot at all if you're going to point the camera at the sky to communicate an act break? If the goal is merely to convey the turmoil of the stage production around which the film is structured, it does no better a job than the infuriating walk-and-talk scenes from Aaron Sorkin's odious West Wing. It lacks the crowd emoting or sense of place of a director like Kurosawa, who knew how to use large groups to heighten a sensation, and by reaching for an arch equivalent to that technique it deprives itself of its one man play-ish feel as well.

Michael Keaton, an actor I really adore, is poorly cast as Riggan Thomas, a washed-up movie star known for a series of trashy Hollywood cash grabs about a Batman-esque character, the titular Birdman. The pathos and frustration that might have made something of the deeply Sophomoric part just aren't Keaton's forte, and his struggle to reconcile the discordant elements of his career feels trivial and bland, the touches of magical realism Iñárritu sprinkles over it never worth much more than their uninspired visual merits. Keaton floating cross-legged. Household objects flung across dressing rooms by telekinesis. The film's ending delivers, if anything, less, exposing the shallowness of Iñárritu's whimsical tonal shifts.

Birdman scrambles down backstage hallways and revolves around conversing figures without doing anything so bland or banal as exploring an emotion or daring to settle on anything uglier than anxieties about selling out. It's a cheap irony that something so concerned with the personal conflict of an actor wrestling with the legacy of his own easy commercial success is itself so conventionally Oscar-friendly. Its contempt for superhero fodder is refreshing, at least, but it gives Riggan's struggles an airless quality, a sense that high art is Good and trash is Bad. That an icy critic threatens to eviscerate his rendition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, only relenting and dispensing praise when he attempts suicide on stage, completes the film's comprehensively stupid look at where the creative and cultural power of art resides.

The presence of the critic as arbitrary and nihilistically salacious antagonist is perhaps the movie's most self-congratulatory flourish. Birdman positions itself as beyond criticism by scorning the very idea that critical analysis has value, protecting its cheap tricks and indulgent but hollow sentimentality behind a screen of transcendent indifference. It hides from its viewers by reaching its own conclusions about its flippantly tortured genius, by circling its own trite ideas until they seem obvious. Hacky, self-congratulatory, and obsessed with its own poorly executed form above to the exclusion of said form's ostensible function, Birdman is a brutally strenuous exercise in superfluity.