Today, the director can shoot any extreme effect, and the audience can swallow any extreme effect. In this situation where the sensory nerves of both sides have evolved to numbness, the aesthetic experimentation of a mirror to the end has been exhausted, and even dazzling skills are not even considered. And Hollywood’s misuse of everything is extremely efficient and quickly turns everything into a cliché. Seeing a two-hour long shot now feels no different from seeing the flood of fast editing in the style of "Very Heavy".
In this case, the use of long lenses must be more cautious. If the story or emotions under the technology are not strong enough, the higher the skill, the more agile a zombie body can operate.
Fortunately, the director Inaritu provided sufficient flesh and blood, the actor provided explosive muscles and bones, and Carver and the superhero provided a tangled soul.
The main story of "Birdman" takes place in one shot. The outdated actor Reagan Thomson once starred in a superhero movie role in the 1990s: Birdman. (Playing Thomson is Michael Keaton, the former Batman.)
Twenty years later, as if centuries have passed, Thomson, abandoned by the new era, lined up a play in an old theater on Broadway. This play is adapted from Carver's novel "What are we talking about when we talk about love", which is directed and acted by him. The purpose of arranging this play is that Thomson, as an actor, is determined to do something "meaningful" in his acting career. Because he was too famous for acting in superhero movies in Hollywood, his career was quickly forgotten by fashionable audiences, and his career was in a mess.
Carver's novel is to find the most meaningful place, where there is no plot, stepping into it is stepping into the quagmire of emotions. This is also the biggest irony of the film. The second personality of the superhero in Thomson’s mind that does not know when he will always remind him of the glory and power of Hollywood, and the serious drama on the Broadway stage always tells him the powerlessness of this world. And absurd.
Thomson came to Broadway with the purpose of "finding meaning" in a typical Hollywood inspirational film, and then fell into the abyss of meaninglessness. The whole film depicts such a meaningful, or meaningless, strange circle.
I still remember Carver writing in a novel that a refrigerator was broken and the food overflowed with indescribable dirty water. The relationship between people in the novel is also like entering a broken refrigerator, corrupt and deteriorating.
When Robert Altman adapted Carver, he used the independent and intertwined multi-thread narrative that Inarito was also good at, and showed a large picture of group play. In Altman's more wide-angle lens In the style, eight groups of characters are each other's background and entangled with each other.
Inarito did not adapt Carver, but he inevitably introduced Carver's spirit of character relationships into the movie. The cramped theater in the film is a broken interpersonal refrigerator, exuding a germ-like dangerous atmosphere everywhere.
Inaritu gave up the multi-clue narrative, but "Birdman" did not jump the rope around the traditional single-clue plot at all. Thomson is the main line, but what makes his image completely stand up is all the characters around him who love him and hate him. The film lens will never give up wandering away from the bewildering gullies of Thomson's face and staring into the face of another character. And then this scene will always quickly attack Thomson with the emotions of another character. For example, his daughter’s resentment and reconciliation towards him, Edward Norton’s well-known drama actor Mike’s mental abuse and gladiatorial fight against him, his ex-wife’s anger and compassion towards him, and his rehearsal actress’ anger and helplessness towards him, Broadway The old woman critic declared war on him, and his "birdman" clone exerted pressure on him to make him "fly up"...
Inaritu’s biggest experiment is to clearly express so many emotional clues while advancing the plot’s life clues in "one long shot." The tools for deepening emotions into people's hearts are those close-up facial close-ups that are too close to breathe.
Inaritu created Carver's sad relationship between the characters, like food spoiled, but he opened doors and windows in Carver's closed psychological world of the characters. What burns Thomson is not only the crushing love and affection, but also the bright light that changes with time.
Thomson muttered to his wife who didn't love him in the play on the stage: "I don't exist, I don't exist". In the "ancient" Carver era, people felt that they did not exist because of the loss and variation of the relationship between people. And his daughter told him that in this day and age, he has no facebook, no twitter, no smart phone, he "doesn't exist at all."
After being scolded by our daughter, we saw Thomson turning a metal cigarette case on the table with super powers. He could only find a little presence in the movie starring in the old days. We saw him burn his hand when he lit the cigarette, and his presence quickly disappeared in his funny hand shaking gesture.
The same technique reappeared when Thomson fantasized about flying. He was drunk and slept on a street garbage bag. After waking up, Birdman’s fantasy began to expand, so he flew over the city. After flying back to the theater, the camera stopped on the street at the entrance of the theater. A taxi driver got out of the car and rushed into the theater to ask him for money.
This flight is the climax of the movie, the last erection of Thomson's Hollywood superhero dream. Afterwards, in extreme pain, he will replace the prop gun with a real gun on the stage, and shoot himself in front of the audience.
But the suicide was unsuccessful, and Birdman blew off his nose. The meaning of the suicide feat was denied. The "meaning" turned into the countless people who lit candles for Thomson on TV, and at the same time turned into the 8,000 followers of her daughter's Twitter account set up for him in one day. His performance was highly praised by the media, and the reputation of the big star in the "Birdman" era seems to return to Thomson. But no one knows that this sensational behavior is really his acting skills in exchange for this reputation. The only victory was that this behavior allowed Thomson to use bloody means to defeat the critic who seemed to be alive in the age of newspapers. All the votes in the age of social networks went to Thomson.
But Thomson himself did not feel relieved to find meaning. Throughout the film, his existence has been oscillating between a superhero actor and a "meaningful" actor. The avatar in his mind told him that the box office rankings existed, and he himself told his wife that this Broadway scene was his real existence. And when he had already blasted off his old nose and put on a weird new nose, he found that everything seemed to be less meaningful, and he jumped out of the window after obtaining a family reconciliation.
We know from his daughter's smile that he is flying. But maybe it means that he was released and arrived on the other side. The director left a difficult mystery. This last flight was just a leap in a sick suit. The flying posture or the posture of not flying at all can only be filled by our humble imagination.
Most movies are dedicated to becoming meaningful celebrations, while Inaritu creates meaningful funerals step by step through overly painful humor. The strange creature in the last flash of the film is like the strange big fish that the yellow tabloid reporter saw on the beach at the end of Fellini's "Sweet Life". It is the same as the fireball across the sky at the beginning and end of the film, becoming a meaningless high-end label.
At the same time that Thomson shot his own behavior, he also sentenced him to death for the "clone" of the superhero that was constantly swelling in his mind. After the self-shooting took place, the long shot ended. On the stage of the Broadway theater, Spider-Man, Transformers, and Captain America are played by actors in clumsy costumes. They beat each other in clumsy lights. Surrounding them are several drummers dressed as carnival parades. . The essence of superheroes is revealed.
The subconscious of the birdman character who had been circling in Thomson's mind finally closed his mouth.
Finally, the novel sixty years ago opened its mouth with dirty water and swallowed the vain cloak of "Batman", that is, the wings of Birdman
-Carver killed Batman.
View more about Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) reviews
