According to the people who set the odds, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman has emerged as one of the favorites for the Best Picture Oscar. By now you probably know it stars former Batman Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, an aging actor who once played a popular superhero -- the title character -- in a series of successful Hollywood movies. Now, 20 or more years removed from his greatest popular success, Riggan is trying to reinvigorate his flagging spirit, recover his credibility and perhaps even become relevant in a digitally blinkered world by staging his own adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" on Broadway.
Most will remember Birdman for the fierce acting by Keaton and Edward Norton, and the virtuosic camerawork that creates the illusion that the film was executed in a single take. I'm more interested in what it says about the anxiety caused by the gap between one's taste and one's ability -- about that feeling of inauthenticity some of us feel when we realize our work isn't what we hoped it would be. It's a movie about a hack who wants to be an artist. (Je suis Riggan Thomson.)
Riggan's chief antagonist is Tabitha, a New York Times theater critic played by Lindsay Duncan, who threatens to pan (and thereby destroy) Riggan's play even before she sees it. She sees him as a Hollywood pretender, using his residual clout to crash the purer, higher art of the theater.
Tabitha is a cliche. We don't know anything about her other than she's powerful and wicked. She's a stand-in for the forces that conspire against the interloper; her actions are those of a defender of the faith, someone who regards Riggan as a kind of artistic infidel. She doesn't believe he can to do justice to his ambition. By her lights, Riggan is no artist. No matter how serious his intent, he can never convince her that he's good enough -- sensitive enough -- to create something authentic.
While she's a caricature and the weakest character in the script, Tabitha's not a completely incredible creation. Every kind of crime -- journalistic and otherwise -- that can be imagined has been committed somewhere by someone. It's fair to imagine a critic who behaves like Tabitha, just as it's fair to imagine a crooked cop or a deceitful husband.
I've known people like her; she's not interested in whether the play succeeds as art -- in whether it causes her to think interesting thoughts about the elusive concept we call "love," or lights up unexpected parts of her brain -- she's interested in protecting her turf.
Yet when Riggan's play opens, Tabitha (spoiler alert) ends up praising the production.
Like the food critic in Ratatouille, she's overwhelmed by the beauty of it all. But even in the few lines of the review that the audience is let in on, it's apparent she has misunderstood the experience. She writes about Riggan digging deep down and uncovering something she calls "hyper-realism." But what he has really done -- because he's deluded or depressed -- is (spoiler alert) attempt suicide right on stage.
While the movie goes on to provide us with a superfluous though understandable final scene, Birdman ends a lot like Taxi Driver: The dangerous crazy guy winds up as a hero of sorts. And not because he meant to.
This lack of intention is underlined by the headline that runs above Tabitha's review: "The unexpected virtue of ignorance." This inelegant phrase is important to our understanding of the film -- the full title of the movie is Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.
It's also a phrase that has caused some problems for some people. At least one filmmaker and writer whose work I respect saw it as an opaque koan hinting at a depth that just isn't there. He didn't believe the people who wrote the movie could explain what it means. But while I'm not sure I can defend the subhead, I do think I understand it: It implies Riggan achieved something artistic despite his lack of talent and sensitivity. Despite his "ignorance."
This backhanded compliment, akin to calling a black athlete "a natural," discounts Riggan's intention. (Tabitha does this even though he provides her evidence of his sincerity -- a cocktail napkin on which Raymond Carver once scribbled a note of encouragement for Riggan.) His reasons for mounting the play are complicated and various, but among them is a genuine desire to make something to cause people to think and feel things they wouldn't otherwise, to be a catalyst for human connection.
Let me refer you to Manny Farber's famous essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," which appeared in 1962 in Film Culture. In that essay, Farber -- who was a very good painter who wrote film criticism on the side -- makes the case for B movies and what came to be known as "underground" cinema as opposed to the monumentality of big Oscar-seeking movies. If you don't know the essay you should read it, but what I take from it is that Farber is saying that some of the best art happens in the margins, when the artist isn't trying to be an artist, when he isn't trying to make a statement but is just trying to make something entertaining.
Or is just following his own eccentric obsessions.
Termite art exists, and it can be wonderful. Look at the early work of Howard Finster, or the anonymous Philadelphia artist they call "the wireman." Look at a lot of rock 'n' roll -- great things can be achieved by enthusiastic children with a dubious grasp of their chosen instruments. "The unexpected virtue of ignorance" is a quality termite artists share. They don't think about art. They are art.
I'm not sure I buy the idea that the best art is only created by oblivious genius. Some really good art is created by people with a lot of spark and little powder -- if you have an obsession and are indifferent to the gaze of others you have a chance of creating something that will touch off vibrations in other hearts. We ought to prize all accidental miracles. But the capacity to feel deeply makes you human but not necessarily an artist. Not a genius.
Birdman is precisely the sort of movie Farber would have called White Elephant Art, with its aspirations for Oscar glory and high-minded talk about the nature of art and artists. It is a wobbly movie, really; it's not as slick and smooth as some insist it is. I do not presume to tell you what Inarritu is trying to say with it. Only that he's trying to say something. Like Riggan Thomson, he's trying to be an artist.
And that there's something noble in that.
And that's the thing -- being an artist is like being an intellectual. You don't get to decide that that's what you are; you just do your work and let people look at it and say what they will, whether it is good or bad (and some of it is good, and some of it is bad), whether you are authentic or a fraud. You open yourself to the critics.
To people like me and Tabitha. Who sometimes misperceive.
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MovieStyle on 02/06/2015