Birdman – Memphis Flyer

The results of last night’s Academy Awards ceremony defy an easily articulated narrative, except to emphasize that 2014 was actually a great year for films. The acting categories went pretty much as expected, with J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette winning handily in the supporting roles, and Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne both landing lead role statues for portraying people with progressive, debilitating diseases. (For the record, Moore was brilliant in Still Alice, but Reese Witherspoon’s Wild was a better film in every way.)

Best Picture winner Birdman.

Among the Best Picture nominees, no one film ran away with the evening. Selma won only Best Original Song for “Glory”, allowing Common and John Legend to give one of the best speeches of the night. SImilarly, American Sniper won only for Sound Editing. There seemed to be a Grand Budapest Hotel wave forming early, as the Wes Anderson film cleaned up in the design and costuming categories, but the tide turned when Birdman beat GBH for Best Original Screenplay. I had expected a Best Director/Best Picture split, with Richard Linklater taking director honors for his masterpiece Boyhood and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman winning the big prize, but Birdman pitched a shutout in the top line categories. Truthfully, all of the Best Picture nominees were worthy, so the indie hero Linklater and Selma‘s director Ava DuVernay had the misfortune to drop great movies into a very tough field. At least Citizenfour was vindicated with a Best Documentary win, even if it did come at the cost of Finding Vivian Maier.

To me, it’s another, less closely watched category that shows the strength of filmmaking in 2014. After The Lego Movie‘s inexplicable non-nomination, Disney won both the Best Animated Feature with Big Hero Six and the Best Animated Short with “Feast”, the adorable dog movie to end all adorable dog movies.

Academy Awards Spread The Love

But when the Oscar Shorts categories was screened by On Location Film Festival earlier this year, there was a clear winner in the animated category, and that was the brilliantly inventive and surprisingly deep “A Single Life”.

A SINGLE LIFE – TRAILER from Job, Joris & Marieke on Vimeo.

Academy Awards Spread The Love (2)

I guess if you’ve got to lose, you might as well lose to a cute dog.

Every once in a while, a film comes along that starkly divides critics and audiences. I usually take this as a sign that an artist has taken a chance and created something new. That is the case with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, a sprawling, thrilling film that, for better and worse, is one of the most fully realized personal visions to hit screens in years.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor famous for playing a superhero named Birdman in the 1990s, but who fell into relative obscurity after leaving the role following three highly successful Hollywood blockbusters. Now, he is attempting a comeback by staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the pressure of writing, directing, and producing the play with his own money is driving him slowly insane as opening night approaches. He starts to believe he has telekinetic powers that only manifest themselves when others aren’t around. And maybe he does — Birdman is not the kind of movie that gives you simple answers to the questions it poses.

The mixture of reality and fantasy extends past the screen, as there is no escaping the comparisons between Keaton, who went into semi-retirement on his ranch in Montana after capping a brilliant career in the 1980s with two Batman movies for director Tim Burton. I don’t know if Keaton, who is riveting in the film’s make-or-break role, thinks he can move things with his mind in real life, but I’m pretty sure Iñárritu does. The technical challenges he called on his cast and crew to overcome in this film rival the most complex in history. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for his work on Gravity, take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and stage the entire film as one continuous shot. Hitchcock did it in 1948’s Rope, which takes place almost entirely in one New York apartment. Similarly, all of Birdman happens in and around the historic St. James Theatre in Times Square, but digital technology has given Lubezki much more freedom of movement than Hitch enjoyed. The camera functions almost as another character in the film, swooping through corridors and spying on the players as they struggle through a parade of theatrical disasters.

and Michael Keaton in Birdman

A host of excellent actors revolve around Keaton, delivering uniformly awesome performances. Most surprising is comedian Zach Galifanakis as Jake, Thomson’s long suffering manager. Edward Norton turns in a wry, self-depreciating turn as Mike, a hotshot actor who is called in at the last minute to replace a crappy thespian whom Thomson may or may not have tried to kill with his telekinesis. Emma Stone is excellent as Sam, Thomson’s resentful, just-out-of-rehab daughter who is struggling to stay straight as she chafes at even the low level of control her father tries to impose on her.

Birdman works as a Noises Off-style backstage comedy, but it is just as much an essay on what the creative process looks like from the inside. Iñárritu tells as clear a story as he ever has in his career, but it’s clear that plot is a secondary consideration for the director. He enthusiastically pours ideas big and small onto the screen and doesn’t seem particularly concerned if all of them register with the audience or not. By making the bad guy Lindsay Duncan’s Tabitha, a snarling New York Times theater critic who promises to savage the play out of spite before she has even seen it, he is all but daring folks like me to criticize him. Several have taken him up on the dare, and now it’s my turn:

Can it with the false endings, Iñárritu. I counted three places where Birdman could have ended on a more satisfying note without sacrificing any of the power or themes that you spent so much time and energy conjuring. C’mon, Poltergeist was 30 years ago. Popular screenwriting books have made false endings fashionable again, but they have become a crutch that filmmakers lean on to avoid making the hardest choices. Pick an ending and go with it.

Wow. That felt refreshingly honest. Just like Birdman!