What's not to love about Birdman? It's a cinephile's masterpiece, and one of the greatest works of symbolism in our era. It's completely original, made to look as if the entire film was shot in one piece, like a play. Which suits it perfectly because a play makes up a good portion of the film. And not just any play, but a play written by a washed-up movie star seeking to redeem himself after selling out to a blockbuster franchise. He's played by Michael Keaton, an actor best known for playing an action hero himself (Batman), and there are some parallels between his character's development and his own personal life. But Keaton didn't write the film, someone else did. In fact, the director wasn't even going to do the film unless Keaton played the lead role.
Its dramatic monologues and masculine humor give it a good balance of serious and silly moments. There are Raymond Carver references, jazz drummers that provide an avant-garde atmosphere, a lesbian make-out scene, an old man running buck naked through Times Square, and psychotic breakdowns galore. The camera literally follows people wherever they go, and the drums in the background make it sound like what Black Swan would have been like if it were a jazz rendition instead of a ballet. The acting was top notch; Ed Norton gives an amazing performance, as usual. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear Rachmaninov's second symphony in the score during the flying scenes, which I've never heard anywhere else in popular culture.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
There's an interplay between fantasy and reality in the film that isn't entirely clear at times. This is especially true when Keaton's character "makes" something from the ceiling fall on an actor's head, and in the end when his daughter "sees" him flying after jumping out the window. For all the film's seeming devotion to realism, this magical ending has a lot of people scratching their heads about what really happened. After watching him shoot himself on stage, I feel that the hospital scene really did happen, despite the director's decision to give it a more "heavenly" atmosphere than the rest of the movie. He shot himself in the nose to get rid of the Birdman's beak, signifying that he was letting go of the past and moving on in the wake of the play's success. Considering this, I'm not even sure it was an attempted suicide. In the hospital he sees his Birdman hallucination, but for the first time in the film he doesn't say anything, causing Keaton's character to mumble a "yeah, fuck you" at him.
The part where he jumps out the window is open to interpretation. Many people think this was his real suicide, and that he was only imagining his daughter smiling at him as he flew away after his death. But I must return to the moment when his telekinetic powers made the camera fall on an actor's head early in the film. If he really didn't have superpowers then how could that have been a coincidence? It opens the door to the interpretation that he did have them, and that he really flew away at the end of the film instead of died. But if this were true then why didn't he really fly through downtown New York before the premier of his play, instead of imagining it? I don't know. I've seen the film three times and haven't been swayed either way.
One thing I have considered is that his daughter may have actually smiled on witnessing his suicide. This is because she had suicide ideations of her own. We know this because of the way she'd been sitting on the ledge of the building in Times Square, searching for the courage to jump off. Suicide to her was a way of liberating oneself from a world she feels is dreadful to live in. After she saw her father dead on the ground, instead of crying out in horror like any normal girl, she may have sensed that he'd become liberated and was flying into the sky like a bird, as he'd always dreamed of doing. It's pretty strange that her father's suicide would make her smile like that but considering her opinions about life this theory seems more plausible.
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