Waiting For "Birdman"

Even skep­tics can anti­cip­ate. I won’t be see­ing Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman (a still is above, fea­tur­ing cost­ars Michael Keaton and Edward Norton) until about a month from now, and of course I’m highly curi­ous, albeit not par­tic­u­larly keen on par­ti­cip­at­ing in any “wars” about the thing. As it hap­pens, when the dir­ect­or’s last film, Biutiful, was in theat­ers, I con­trib­uted a piece to Film Comment entitled: “This Can’t End Well: How We Live Now, or The New Humanism accord­ing to Alejandro González Iñárritu.” The piece, which appeared in the November/December 2010 issue, can­not be accessed online, or else I’d just link to it. So I’ve dis­tilled the gist of my argu­ment from the essay’s final para­graphs, for your consideration: 

[…]Iñárritu’s films […] always with­hold any­thing even vaguely resem­bling a happy end­ing […] are nev­er­the­less in the uplift busi­ness. While truck­ing in […] lib­er­al piet­ies, his that’s‑just-the-way-it-is per­spect­ive res­ists expli­cit ideo­logy, so as to evade the idea that there might be any­thing resem­bling a genu­ine polit­ic­al response to any of the human misery his films depict. […] This really does let every­body off the hook, but the per­spect­ive doesn’t so much come out and con­grat­u­late the audi­ence as it does Iñárritu him­self: for his seem­ingly self-proclaimed insist­ence on look­ing at all of the pain of human exist­ence with an unflinch­ing gaze. And of course it is that which spurs on a form of audi­ence self-congratulation: ‘He gets it, and I get it the way that he gets it.’ Iñárritu invites you to wal­low in his tra­gic sense. And this, of course, is what makes his films sort of critic-proof. But it’s also what makes so many crit­ics feel he’s a strong-arm artist, a film­maker who instead of allow­ing the audi­ence to respond emo­tion­ally, bludgeons or even black­mails them into being moved.

Near the end of [Biutiful], [Javier] Bardem’s char­ac­ter, grind­ing closer and closer to his death, takes his young daugh­ter in a tight embrace and, almost melt­ing into her, begs, “Remember me. Don’t for­get me, Ana.” The shot is simply com­posed, the sen­ti­ment the char­ac­ter expresses is, you’ll excuse the term, uni­ver­sal, and the act­ors note-perfect. It’s as naked and ‘real’ and mov­ing a thing as Iñárritu has ever put on film, an unabashed and unadorned depic­tion of human frailty, vul­ner­ab­il­ity, and van­ity. And then he has to go and spoil it all by cut­ting from that to the in-your-face res­ol­u­tion of a storyline involving a couple of the film’s Asian ‘entre­pren­eurs,’ which rings ten times more falsely than it ordin­ar­ily would have, had the pri­or scene not rung so true. It’s as if Iñárritu can’t help him­self. Again: can he? Looks as if we won’t find out until his next film.