ARTS & CULTURE
12 Obiter Dicta
A Trio of Film Reviews, Currently in Theatres
An Avalanche of Actors
kendall grant › staff writer
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of
Ignorance) (2014) 3/4
Tasty, ironic, incisive, and savagely audacious,
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is
a weird brew of backstage black comedy and theatrical satire, a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption,
and a dark comedy of desperation buoyed by unbridled artistic optimism. It will make you laugh out
loud and curse the shadows; spinning you around six
ways from Sunday.
Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is a washed-up
actor who abandoned the Birdman franchise to reinvent his career by directing and starring in an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love.” After the lead
is injured, Riggan replaces him with famous method
actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton, The Grand
Budapest Hotel). The play is produced by best friend
Jake (Zach Galifianakis) and stars girlfriend Laura
(Andrea Riseborough) and actress Lesley (Naomi
Watts, The Impossible); his assistant is estranged
daughter Sam (Emma Stone, Easy A). Riggan’s exwife Sylvia (Amy Ryan, Win Win) is tepidly supportive; New York Times critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan)
is openly hostile.
It’s a rich, startling, and multi-layered collage;
finding writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu
(Amores perros, 21 Grams) in the mood for play; creating a meta-universe of mirrors, prop guns, and performances upon performances; and with a mighty
cast that fields every pitch he throws. The film’s built
around a role that Keaton had to become a has-been
to play, and the long-missed actor delivers impressively. Norton and Stone get the punchiest scenes
(two on a rooftop) and use them to full advantage;
they’re instant Oscar-nomination reels.
Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the overacting – the performers know
Birdman’s a theatrical exercise and relish the chance
to pull out the stops. Dazzling and rambling, intimate and sprawling, it’s a jubilant ride; a full-fledged
wonder of showbiz about showbiz. Funny and fastmoving, the bravura gestures balance the film’s
mystical ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes.
Drummer Antonio Sanchez provides a hustling backbeat throughout – a thrumming, off-the-cuff, jazz
percussion score.
As a simulated
s i n g l e-t a ke o f
almost two hours,
Birdman sizzles,
scintillates, teases,
t au nt s, b a rk s,
brays, preens, and careens with limitless energy. (To
be clear, Hitchcock’s Rope did the same thing without
digital trickery more than half a century ago.) Still,
it’s a remarkable feat of choreography – everyth ing
had to be timed as in a dance. World-class cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men, The Tree
of Life, Gravity) wows once again with jaw-dropping
cinematography that spins, pirouettes, and stays aloft
scene after scene.
Serious, silly, and self-aware, Birdman questions
stardom and celebrity, punctuated by humour that
verges on slapstick; its tone is at once empathetic
and acidic. Yet there’s an underlying anger in evidence, a rage against a movie market that champions superhero blockbusters and sidelines the talent
that provokes discomfort. With its improvisatory
style, its seamless shots, its surrealistic flourishes,
and its well-calibrated shifts, Birdman provides an
Playing off the exaggerated conceits of Dogville,
t he docu ment a r y c a m e r awork of T h e
Wrestler, the thematic ambition
of Synecdoche,
New York, and the technological touchstones of The
Social Network, Birdman ascends to great heights. It
may not be as scalpel-sharp a dissection of Broadway,
Hollywood, and fame in the 21st century as it thinks
it is, but it’s a galvanic blast from start to finish. As
suggested by the clever subtitle (a Kubrickian tribute,
perhaps), blundering can be bliss.
“Force Majeure is a prickly moral
comedy for grown ups . . .”
ê The camerawork and editing of Birdman was manipulated to give the appearance that most of the film is one
continuous long take.
unpredictable response to the sea of mediocre formula at the centre of its critique. It makes an argument that everything flows together.
Like so many other films in 2014, Birdman proves
that a kinetic film can soar on the wings of its technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it back to earth. Don’t get me wrong
– the occasional downdrafts can’t keep Birdman from
taking to the skies. It dips, and it also takes thrilling
flight. But it’s hard not to leave with the suspicion that
it signifies less than Iñárritu would have us believe.
Force Majeure (2014) 3/4
Gleefully uncomfortable, deliciously awkward, and
corrosively funny, Force Majeure is a comedy of passive aggressiveness with a nerve-cinching grip, delivered with Kubrickian unease. Plotted with forensic
exactitude, it’s a quiet avalanche that leaves the audience squirming in all the best ways.
A family takes a five-day ski holiday in the French
Alps. During lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an
avalanche turns everything upside down. The anticipated disaster fails to occur, but in the aftermath, the
quartet is torn apart by cowardice as their dynamic
is shaken to its core. Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), the
family’s patriarch, struggles desperately to reclaim
his role as family patriarch, but mother Ebba (Lisa
Loven Kongsli) refuses to let him off the hook.
Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure and bracingly cinematic in its formal approach,
Force Majeure is a prickly moral comedy for grownups, full of spectacular scenery, sharply observed
moments, and masterfully manipulated atmosphere.
An arrangement of the stormy Summer finale from
Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” keeps the viewer in jittery
anticipation, adding caustic condemnation through
ice-cold humour.
Swed ish writer-d i rector Ruben Östlu nd
(Involuntary, Play) is a gifted creator of malignant
ambience, a glacial and ever-more-confident stylist, and a brutal satirist of his countrymen’s foibles,
presumptions, and hidden prejudices. Like Bergman
with a wicked streak, Östlund never pushes his own
metaphors too far. In Tomas, Östlund diagnoses
traits of stunted male egotism and whopping immaturity, matched with a warped desire to look like a
hero; Ebba, meanwhile, is far from blame-free, especially in agreeing to present a “united front” to their
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