Mel McGinnis is a 45-year-old cardiologist married to Teresa, also known as Terri.
They live together in Albuquerque.
The narrator describes Mel as tall and rangy with curly soft hair and Teresa (who is Mel's second wife) as bone-thin with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair.
Mel and Terri have two friends named Nick and Laura.
Nick is 38 years old and is the narrator of the story.
Laura is 35, married to Nick, and works as a legal secretary.
They are a group of friends.
The story is about four friends—Mel, Teresa (Terri), Laura, and Nick.
The setting is Mel's house, around a table with a bucket of ice in the middle.
They soon start to talk about love (as the title suggests).
Terri has had an abusive relationship.
The abuse, she says, derives from love.
Ed, Terri's former abusive boyfriend, "loved her so much he tried to kill her."
Ed would beat Terri.
He dragged her around the living room by her ankles knocking her into things along the way.
Terri believed that Ed loved her and his abuse was his way of showing it.
No matter what Terri said, Mel refused to believe that was "love".
Ed also stalked Mel and Terri and called Mel at work with threatening messages.
At one point, Mel was so scared he bought a gun and made out a will.
Mel even wrote to his brother in California, saying that "if something happened to him" to look for Ed.
Terri's abusive boyfriend eventually committed suicide after two attempts (as Terri sees it, another act of love).
Ed's first attempt at suicide was when Terri had left him.
Ed had drunk rat poison, but was rushed to the hospital where he was saved.
In Ed's second, successful attempt he shot himself in the mouth.
Someone heard the shot from Ed's room and called the manager.
Terri and Mel argued about whether she could be in the room with him when he died.
Terri won and was with Ed as he died; as Terri put it, "He never came up out of it."
Soon afterward, Mel begins a story about an elderly couple struck by a drunk driver, a teenager who was pronounced dead at the scene.
The couple survived the car accident because they were wearing seat belts.
Mel was called into the hospital that night just as he sat down to dinner.
Once he arrived, he saw how badly the elderly couple had been injured.
He said that they had "multiple fractures, internal injuries, hemorrhaging, contusions, and lacerations."[3]
The couple were in casts and bandages from head to toe.
Mel's point in telling the story was the husband's upset when the couple was moved into the intensive care unit.
Mel would visit the couple daily, and when he put his ear to the husband's mouth-hole, the latter told Mel he was upset because he could not see his wife through his eye-holes.
Mel would stray from the topic with more talk about Ed, his personal thoughts about love, hatred toward his ex-wife, and life as a knight.
Mel felt even though one loves a person, if something were to happen to them, the survivor would grieve but love again.
After finishing the second bottle of gin, the couples discuss going to dinner, but no one makes any moves to proceed with their plans.
Riggan Thomson (Keaton) is a washed-up Hollywood actor who once played the superhero Birdman in three blockbuster movies, before leaving the multi-billion-dollar franchise.
The play is produced by Riggan's best friend/lawyer Jake (Galifianakis), and stars Riggan's girlfriend Laura, first-time-Broadway-actress Lesley (Watts), and Mike (Norton).
Riggan's daughter Sam (Stone), a recovering drug addict, is Riggan's spunky, bedraggled assistant.
In order to afford Mike as a replacement actor (after Riggan supposedly try to kill the first actor by causing a spotlight to fall on him during a rehearsal), Riggan refinances a house that should belong to his daughter, Sam, so he's flat broke.
Throughout all of this, Riggan is mocked and bolstered by his voice as Birdman, which emanates from a "Birdman 3" movie poster in his dressing room.
We see Riggan perform telekinesis during the movie, and even levitating during meditation, but the phenomenon is not a major plot point, and it's left to the viewer if it really takes place outside of his Riggan's imagination.
During a preview, Riggan, Mike, and Lesley perform a scene where Riggan's character catches Lesley and Mike having sex in a motel, after which Riggan's character laments about not existing, and then commits suicide.
After one of the previews, Mike advises Riggan to find a more realistic prop gun.
Riggan reads early reviews and is incensed that Mike, the replacement, has stolen the spotlight.
Mike has even told the press that Raymond Carver was his inspiration to become an actor, which is Riggan's origin story.
Riggan desperately wants to be relevant, but the initial reviews did nothing to improve his ego/self-esteem, and those fears of being irrelevant deepened after an emotional confrontation by his daughter Sam, where she told him that he, like the rest of the world, doesn't matter, and to get used to it.
In the middle of a subsequent preview, Riggan accidentally locks himself out of the theater and has to speed-walk in his underwear through the bustling streets of New York City in order to get back into the theatre, where he finishes the preview to a confused and perhaps delighted audience.
He becomes a viral sensation for that speed-walk, which is ironic considering he had no social-media presence at all up until that time, and that he didn't believe social media made people relevant.
After the performance, Riggan runs into theater-critic Tabitha.
She reveals that she hates Hollywood celebrities who attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate actors and that she will destroy his play by writing the worst review ever written.
Frustrated, Riggan gets drunk (you have the sense he's a recovering alcoholic), and the following day hallucinates about communing with Birdman and possessing ever greater superpowers, including flight.
On opening night, the performances are better than ever.
Riggan, having taken Mike's advice a bit too much to heart, uses a real gun for the final scene, shooting himself in the head in front of the audience, and earns a standing ovation from all but Tabitha, who walks out during the applause.
You next see him in the hospital, very much alive, because he had only managed to shoot off his nose during the play.
His face bandages resemble Birdman's mask.
Best friend Jake is ecstatic about a very unexpected rave review from Tabitha, lauding Riggan's development of a new acting style she dubs "Super-Realism," and the fact that his best friend is still alive.
While alone in his hospital room, after a poignant father-daughter moment with Sam, Riggan spots birds flying outside his hospital room and climbs out onto the ledge.
When Sam returns, Riggan is gone. Sam hurries to the window, looks down at the street, expecting to see a body, then with a puzzled expression slowly looks skyward, and then smiles brightly.
Filming commenced in March 2013 in New York City.[6]
According to the film's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, the camerawork and editing of Birdman were manipulated to give the appearance that most of the film is one continuous long take.[7]
On January 7, 2014, Antonio Sánchez was set to compose the music for the film.[8] The soundtrack album was released on October 14, 2014.[9]
The movie is driven by simple but powerful drumming, and visuals of drumming are incorporated into the movie in several scenes, whether in a drum line or a lone man at a drum kit.
On July 10, 2014, it was announced that Birdman had been selected as the opening film of the 71st Venice International Film Festival and would be in competition for the Golden Lion.[10] The film was released on October 17, 2014 in the United States.[11]
Birdman has been met with universal acclaim. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a rating of 93%, based on 117 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A thrilling leap forward for director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman is an ambitious technical showcase powered by a layered story and outstanding performances from Michael Keaton and Edward Norton."[12]Metacritic gave the film a score of 89 out of 100, based on reviews from 44 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[13]
Peter Debruge of Variety magazine praised the film, describing it as "a self aware showbiz satire" and calling it "a triumph on every creative level".[14] Robbie Collin of The Telegraph gave the film 5/5. Collin has particular praise for the use of long takes by Emmanuel Lubezki, director of photography.[15]Richard Roeper gave the film an "A", and said that Keaton makes a serious case for a Best Actor nomination.[16]
The director A. G. Inarritu narrates a sequence from “Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” with Michael Keaton and Edward Norton.
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“Birdman,” a big bang of movie razzle-dazzle from A. G. Inarritu, opens with a winking sleight of hand.
Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood has-been turned Broadway second-chancer played by a blissed-out Michael Keaton, is hanging out in his dressing room at the St. James Theatre in Times Square, by which we mean "floating", like a mystic who’s passed transcendence and gone straight to nirvana.
It’s a destabilizing liftoff for a funny, frenetic, buoyant and rambunctiously show-boating entertainment in which Ianarritu himself rises high and then higher still.
It’s a nice change of direction for Inarritu, who has tended to pull viewers low and then lower in beautiful bummer movies, like his last one, “Biutiful,” about a terminally ill man who communes with the dead.
For “Birdman,” he has lightened both his mood and metaphysical load to productive effect by concentrating on Riggan’s efforts to stage — as writer, director and star — an adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
It sounds like an alarming idea (and a strange fit, especially given Carver’s minimalism and Mr. Inarritu’s maximalism), yet Riggan has bet his career on it in hopes that the play will deliver him from his ignoble, lucrative past playing a screen super-hero called "Birdman".
Did someone say Icarus?
Well, no, that name doesn’t come up in this back-stage comedy (and sometimes drama), at least not that we remember, although Inarritu and his co-writers (Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo) toss others including Roland Barthes, J. L. Borges and Martin Scorsese.
The story is as old as time — the play’s the thing, once again — and unwinds over several dreamily integrated days and nights that take Riggan from his meditative calm through the labyrinthine halls of the St. James in the hours and minutes leading up to the opening, during which (big breath): he rehearses an actor, receives a kiss, throws a punch, downs a drink, smokes a joint, walks a street and waxes poetic, comic, tragic and melodramatic.
Michael Keaton plays an actor haunted by his past in the comedy "Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance."
Embracing the principle of more, Inarritu packs the movie with multitudes, assorted backstage shenanigans, showbiz clichés and commedia dell’arte types.
As Riggan moves onstage and off, from rehearsal to dressing room, he finds romance in the wings, instigates a little cloak and dagger, and powers through some heart-to-heart encounters with his rehabbed daughter, Sam (a wonderful Stone in cynical ragamuffin mode).
A supercilious theatre actor, Michael, played by a pitch-perfect, perfectly cast Edward Norton, challenges Riggan mentally and physically by declaring his allegiance to the theatre (truth or bust!) at one point wielding a copy of J. L. Borges’s “Labyrinths” so ostentatiously that even the most myopic moviegoer should be able to read the title.
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “Birdman” stars Michael Keaton as a movie star.
Action creates re-action, and together they create flowing, organic form in “Birdman.”
Riggan isn’t the only man on the move.
So is Inarritu, who has staged and shot the movie so that it looks like everything that happens, from airborne beginning to end, occurs during one transporting continuous take.
The camera doesn’t just move with the story and characters, it also ebbs and flows like water, soars and swoops like a bird, its movement as fluid as a natural element, as animated as a living organism. (Like that famous Steadicam shot in “GoodFellas” but longer.)
Inarritu’s partner in illusionism is the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki, a Houdini of fluid camera movements whose genius is for keeping you watching rather than distractedly wondering.
Emma Stone and Edward Norton in "Birdman."
The camera work in “Birdman” is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space.
And as soon as Riggan floats down to earth, a series of walls — between character and actor, onstage and off, representation and reality — begin to collapse.
The most obvious divide is between Keaton, who, starting in 1989, played Batman in two movies directed by Tim Burton, and Riggan, who made a killing playing Birdman, a feathered franchise jackpot.
Years later, Riggan appears haunted by birdman, whose image stares out from a poster hanging in the actor’s dressing room and who, in a creepy basso profundo rasp, offers a stream of Sammy Glick-isms about career and fame.
A few movies back, Inarritu parted ways with his frequent collaborator, the writer G. Arriaga.
The two had joined forces with the 2000 triptych “Amores Perros” and then proceeded to win new admirers and detractors with other multi-stranded narratives, “21 Grams” and “Babel.”
Some fell for “21 Grams” despite its absurdities, largely on the strength of its performances by the likes of Naomi Watts, who, in “Birdman,” plays an actress, Lesley.
But Inarritu lost some with “Babel,” less because of its melodramatic excesses than because of its mechanistic quality and sanctimony.
“Birdman” marshals its enjoyable excesses into a rigorous form, too, but here a newly generous Inarritu has made room for the audience’s pleasure.
He’s also given the finger wagging a rest.
To that end, it’s worth drawing your eye to the small card stuck on one of the mirrors in Riggan’s dressing room that reads,
“A thing is a thing not what is said of that thing.”
It sounds a bit like Gertrude Stein or poorly translated Kant, but is attributed to Susan Sontag.
It may be a gloss on a line from “Against Interpretation,” her book of essays on impoverished criticism and its “shadow world of ‘meanings.' ” (“A work of art is a thing in the world,” she writes, “not just a text or commentary on the world.”)
There’s plenty to embrace in Sontag’s polemic, though a critic can perhaps be forgiven for rooting around in the shadow world of meanings if the art work has cloaked itself in Meaning and Importance, as some of Mr. Inarritu’s movies have done.
You can dig or just skate in this significantly better new one, the full title of which is “Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.”
That phrase appears late in the movie, by which time Riggan has dodged various bullets, including a lover, Laura (Andrea Riseborough, amusing); an ex-wife, Sylvia (Amy Ryan, touching); and his frantic producer, Jake (Zach Galifianakis, deftly funny).
Riggan has also crossed paths with a terribly mean theater critic for The New York Times, the rhymes-with-witch Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan), who threatens to close his play before seeing it.
Her threat provokes a savage verbal assault on her from Riggan, an invective that by its very heat, expresses a conflicted desire for her benediction.
This, you see, is also what we talk about when we talk about love.
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