Off-beat entertainer

Ervell E. Menezes

For Michael Keaton, it is a transformation of sorts from Batman to Birdman whereas Riggan Thomson, the Birdman, plays a fading star trying his best to reinvent himself in Birdman (or The Unexpected virtue of Ignorance).
Performing a tight-rope walk between fantasy and realism, the reinvention is even surrealistic with a variety of characters contributing to what is called super-realism, a sort of sister to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism.
Riggan decides to do Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and has his ebullient daughter Sam (Emma Stone) as his assistant. He also enlists the services of brilliant but volatile Broadway star Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), who wastes no time in wooing Sam. As part of the super-realism structure, the camera moves suddenly from interior monologues to on-stage scenes with live audiences and applauses, which initially tend to confusing. The play about love sings its absolute virtues repetitiously and somewhat annoyingly.
Sam’s monologue castigating her dad as a ‘has-been’ is as striking as it is candid and there are other cameos like Laura (Andrea Risenborough), his girl-friend, Jake (Zach Galifrankis), his lawyer, Leslie (Naomi Watts), Mike’s former girl-friend that lend support to action. There is also Riggan’s encounter with drama critic Tibitha Dickinson (Lindsay Duncan) that is as caustic as it is hilarious and vies with Sam’s monologue for pride of place.  A line of intrigue runs right through even unto the very climax and one can imagine Inaritu chuckling behind the scenes. In Michael Keaton we find a sort of reinvention, wig et al, and he seems to steal the limelight from Edward Norton, whose Fight Club role still lingers in memory. Emma Stone is brilliant and cameos by Naomi Watts as well as Andrea Rosenborough round off this off-beat entertainer.