Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
This is for Allison, who told me to see this movie two months before I got around to it. Kate and I just got back from seeing Birdman at the Denver West Cinema.
Still digesting, willing to see it again. Soon. First, it grabbed me emotionally like a stage production. It had me in the story the whole time. Its meta-nature, a film about a play taken from a short story and written by a used-to-be comic book action film hero, Birdman, who also stars in the play could have suffocated a lesser work, but the weaving in and out of these various artistic forms was done well, not jarring at the transition points.
The acting, especially Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone, was bravura, taken to the edge of emotional intensity over and over again.
This is a movie about passion, about love, about hope and dreams, about going as far with a project as possible. It is a movie about art and the fragile humans who create it.
Keaton deserves to win an academy award for his performance, as do Norton and Stone. Keaton’s weariness and wariness overlaid by his taking a huge artistic risk in bringing this show to Broadway comes across in so many scenes, but in none more clearly than the magical realism of the Birdman sequences. The tension between his Hollywood, movie star past and his dream of doing something worthwhile in live theater clash.
At one point he is in despair about his play (again) and throws himself off a building, an apparent suicide. Instead he flies along the streets of Manhattan, balding and wearing a Columbo wrinkled overcoat: in appearance he’s the middle-aged man who has put his life up for judgement on Broadway, in flight though he is once again Birdman.
Any of us who have put our dreams on paper, canvas, stage, film, or in digital media will find this film a fellow traveler with our own journey. My novel manuscripts, stacked in bankers boxes in the loft, traveled with Keaton as he paced the back halls of the theater.
If you’ve not seen this movie, see it. It’s a work of art.
