Thursday, January 22, 2015

Film: Birdman, 2014, Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

The irony of the Golden Globe Award for original script this year for "Birdman" is that it is exactly the script that is the problem of this movie...
It is half "back-stage" comedy/drama (with all the cliche moves typical of that genre), and half allegory. A very confused allegory at that, which cannot draw a clean parable of meaning or communicate a clear message. Its appeal, I believe, comes from this confusedness which some snobbish viewers take for complexity. Well, the story is a complete mess. The writers put every idea that crossed their mind (many of them totally unoriginal and annoying) into the script. It has everything - an actor whose stage life is more real than his real life (how tired is that?!), another actor who wants to make art but is only recognized as a celebrity (another cliche), a critic who just "hates" an actor and is determined to destroy him without even having seen him perform (a totally random and whimsical argument), a mixture of life and art with art dominating life (cliche), etc.
The genre of the allegory is quite treacherous - it requires everything to be thought out on two different planes - on the plane of reality and on the plane of allegory and to make sense on both. All the elements should click together precisely in order to be meaningful. Multiple components of this film are puzzling and defy meaning - the multiple endings, the transformation of the actor into the character of Birdman (after the success of his show?!), his final flight....It is hard to try to interpret a mess -- seems like a waste of time.
Mr. Inarritu, mumbled some pretentious nonsense in his acceptance speech about "mirroring" - he seems to be considering himself an intellectual. While he should simply stop writing his own scripts.

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