"Birdman" Flies Straight Into the Sun

This misguided showbiz satire proves that style is never better than substance.

March 5, 2023

On a frigid April night on the calm seas of the North Atlantic, RMS Titanic unknowingly sails towards its tragic destiny. As the world’s societal elite sleep soundly in their beds and the rat population scurries throughout steerage, two young lovers burst through a doorway and emerge on the poop deck. Rejoicing in their youthful affections, they twirl about in a giggle fit before facing one another, vowing to run off when the ship docks.

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As they seal their promise with a smooch, the lookouts stationed in the crow’s nest look down. It was not Jack and Rose’s fault that the two men were voyeurs. It is not on us to manage the sexual fetishes of any potential observers of our public displays of affection. After all, passion is immediate: we must act on it. If someone happens to see and chooses to fix their gaze upon us, what of it?

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Enter iceberg, which the ship collides with thanks to a delayed response from the horny lookouts getting their rocks off to the young lovers frenching below. In 2 ½ hours, it will be at the bottom of the North Atlantic, along with the 1,500 souls it will take down with it.

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Distractions are, in a word, problematic.

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Of course, movies themselves are distractions. We seek them out when we crave familiarity in troubling times. We get dumped, someone lies, we lose our job, or someone dies; whatever is causing our distress, movies are there. If we attend the theater out of love for film, we are distracted nonetheless. We will not think of that meeting we hoped to avoid or that nosy neighbor who always peers in at private moments. We will not think of the toilet we know will inexplicably be clogged when we return or the coworker we plan to ask out the second we’re certain an advance won’t result in termination and a lawsuit.

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But inside the movie itself, distractions are never fruitful. Unfortunately for Birdman, it is built on distractions.

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Riggan Thomson is a has-been movie star who popularized the superhero Birdman. As he attempts to restart his career with a stage play, he gets plagued by the internal voice of his iconic character, hallucinates feats of levitation and telekinesis, and faces the struggles that come with chasing his dream.

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It is a film that relies on idiosyncrasies to create an effect. The visions of supernatural abilities and internal monologues do little to convince us that the man we follow is worth studying, in part because of a truth few film lovers wish to hear: style is a distraction. It can be intriguing on its own and compelling as a concept, but in practice, it tugs us from the story, usually on purpose. Most movies trying to say something fail because the creators are not insightful in their observations. Thus, they employ gimmicks to give the appearance of depth.

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The continuous shot style is an intriguing idea, but it serves little purpose. It wraps us in that chaotic feeling of the stage, where costume changes and set strikes have to happen at lightning speeds, and it does its part to keep the world self-contained, but outside those rare moments, it’s just a means of playing at purpose. Film is an arena to express ideas, and the foundation of all expression is effort. We cannot grow if we do not try. Birdman fails itself because it confuses effort with success.

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In a vacuum, effort is success because effort can often be enough to earn acclaim and win awards. In fact, the film Birdman beat for Best Picture was a movie whose concept, filming every summer for 12 years, was its champion. In reality, it was a hollow film that confused nostalgic soundtracks for substance and the principle of its structure for feeling.

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Birdman, while not in the same fashion, is cynical. It refuses to believe in its potential, so it winks at the audience by setting characters against their actor. Keaton is Riggan, the former costumed megastar who has faded into relative obscurity. Norton is Mike, the combative preener whose arrogance obscures his talent. We may enjoy the wink as a passing thing, and by itself, it is not damning, but it speaks to the overarching issue: for a movie to get taken seriously as badly as Birdman wants to be, it must first take itself seriously.

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It's in the moments when Mike, a pompous, morally bankrupt theater actor, talks with Sam, Riggan’s recovering addict daughter, that Birdman finds meaning. It defies classification because it isn’t trying to be more than two people talking. It is in conversations that we find ourselves and discover each other. Sides we thought we’d lost rush to the surface, and sentiments we thought we’d rejected become part of us. Despite the filters we place on ourselves, hampering our emotional expression with arrogance or addiction, we always have some of us waiting to get found.

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Birdman thinks that part of us is in getting haunted by the voice of an action hero and visualizing yourself flying around Manhattan, but it’s not. It is the death knell of great filmmaking: an idea being different doesn’t mean it is effective. Art is predicated on pretension. We must find something in nothing and thus imbue the nothing with something. A thing without intent is just a thing, and artists know it. We must challenge that thing if we are to find actual value.

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Challenging Birdman is easy because its life is built on interpretation. All of its abstraction is catnip for people who insist that defying convention is profound, but in reality, it's empty, always relying on telling and not showing. We get told a man confuses love for admiration, that his attempt to recapture relevance is self-indulgent. We see a man battling the life he used to lead and the urge to cut the ties that bind and become more, but only by getting shown a visual cue. In reality, even that showing is telling: the very presence of Birdman, never mind the plain monologues, tells us Riggan’s struggle.

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If Birdman understood the difference between directness and preaching, it would have substance. We can make a message clear: a theme is a different matter. Longing, love, passion, ambition: those are themes. The inevitable self-destruction of longing if we do not recognize the love we crave is a passion that does more to hinder us than help us realize our ambition? That is a message.

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Thematics should always get subdued, but not messages. Messages can and should get preached, provided you preach effectively. Birdman is a movie that piles on its universal value with gimmicks instead of realizing that just because your value is universal does not mean you have nothing to say. All artists want to believe their take is more profound than the previous one. A message lies in embracing that, within our common ground, we can find that depth.

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Birdman succeeds in many ways. It is atmospheric without feeling contrived. It name-drops real people to add stakes to Riggan’s story but never loses sight of the world it inhabits. It occasionally has an amusing bluntness, if only to scratch the itch to criticize film stars who wax poetic about the theater or “critics" who mistake vomiting a thesaurus onto a piece of paper for meaning. It sets a scene with theater lighting and, despite everyone being one-dimensional in their conception, no character ever feels limited.

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Unfortunately, Birdman cannot rely on these things, or its gimmicks, for its entire runtime. It must at some point do what all movies do and call its number: either it has the legs to stand and be what it aspires to, or it does not. It is a movie with many limp ideas about what our work means and why we do it, but no thoughts on the concepts it floats out. If it were more concerned with moments like Riggan's talk with his ex-wife, where the split between the hero he played and the man he wants to become converge on a lament of not being there for his family, it would be a great movie. It has that special something simmering beneath but is so obsessed with being special it benches its magic for circus tricks.

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As such, nothing has meaning aside from what it is, but without the directness to make that surface-level acknowledgment worthwhile. It could slap us with the truth of Riggan’s story and the parallels we can draw to our lives, but it doesn’t. It does nothing, almost as if something would take too much effort.

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‍Birdman makes it from time to time, but movies do not go on as long as life. Every second matters. Wasting a single moment means wasting the film entirely, and there is no worse waste than distraction. Birdman’s distractions may not have sacrificed 1,500 people to an icy death in the middle of the North Atlantic, but to scale, they were just as damaging. If only it had cared more for itself, Birdman could have flown sky high.