Review of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) by Jiggers T — 09 Aug 2015

On Oscars night 2014, there was a hullabaloo about Birdman winning best picture. I cheered, without having seen the movie, because it felt like the right pick, what with the renewal of Michael Keaton, a Spanish director Innaritu, it felt like the right socially conscious pick. Plus the commercials made the film seem really bad@ss, so I couldn't see how it could possibly be bad. FFWD a year or more and I have finally watched this movie. It started off well enough with some interesting camera movements and a disturbed Michael Keaton floating in the air. How could it fail? The problem for me was the ending. I kept waiting for that payoff, about what Birdman symbolically was and how this story was important for me to watch.

It's hard to underestimate the importance of a good ending, it ties everything together and makes the perfect symbol for the audience to understand. What is the moral of the story? And with Birdman, that moral was seemingly nil. I have long grown unaccepting of Hollywood's pale use of suicide as a trope for a main character to feel any kind of sorrow. I don't know what has happened with Hollywood that characters now have to give up in order for us empathize with them. There is no spirit of the undying, just 'moop, I give up'. Very short, curt and to the point, I guess.

But why? Suicide should only be used as the ultimate expression of frustration. But with movies like The Artist and Birdman, we make extreme light of this act in a cartoony, funny sort of way--and it doesn't need that, it doesn't allow that. No one laughed the day comedy died, the day Robin Williams left us. Suicide is something completely ununderstandable, and it will stay that way. A movie trying to explain it in such pale terms should be looked down upon.

I'm afraid Hollywood is guilty of not caring enough. They selected this movie probably because they felt it looked nice, even if its narrative makes little sense, and a lot of the acting performances are utterly wasted. Birdman was a callous oscars win, it showed that rich people have about as much care in them as porcelain dolls.