Birdman and 'Real Performance'

Washed-up actor Riggan Thompson can't tell where Riggan ends and his menacing alter-ego/former character Birdman begins.  This is just as well, because moviegoers may find themselves similarly confused in the layers of performance and fictionality at play in the latest Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film, Birdman.  Played by Michael Keaton, Riggan once starred in a popular superhero franchise as "Birdman," who can levitate, fly and direct objects with a sweep of his hand.  Though Riggan still gets recognized in public, his high-flying days as an actor are behind him.  Riggan is thus attempting to revitalize his career by directing, producing and starring in a stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story.

The adaptation looks like a disaster, dogged by personnel and production problems.  A falling ceiling winch injures Riggan's costar during rehearsal; forced to improvise, Riggan calls in Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a manic method actor in a tempestuous relationship with fellow co-star Lesley (Naomi Watts) who threatens to unravel the whole production.  Meanwhile Riggan's sanity visibly frays.  He's haunted by the gravelly voice of Birdman, who encourages Riggan to shun his theatrical vanity project and return to his once-successful franchise.  "You tower over these theater douchebags...gravity doesn't even apply to you!" hisses his darker half.

Framing the film as a struggle between Riggan's ego (his civilized desire for actor-ly validation on Broadway) and id (the bloodthirsty Birdman) works up to a point, though Birdman's insights on the nature of authenticity, of performance and of subjectivity ultimately extend far beyond a psychoanalytic read.  But it is tempting to stick to that interpretation, largely because of the remarkable technical trick Inarritu and the wonderful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have pulled off.  Incredibly, the film appears to have been filmed in only one shot.

Hitchcock and others have attempted this illusion, but the deft, nimble motions of the camera in Birdman are more in the tradition of Alfonso Cuaron's astonishing single-shot wartime birth sequence in Children of Men than than the static stage scenes of Rope.  Birdman tops them as a cinematic spectacle, however, and moreover, it truly uses the single-shot illusion as a piece of the storytelling.  It is difficult to imagine Birdman without this most distinctive characteristic, and besides it has meaning for the story.  Lubezki's camera follows Riggan through labyrinthine back hallways of his theater, onto the stage, up onto the roof, through the crowded streets of Manhattan, and even into the sky, as the Birdman persona begins to take over.

This seemingly uninterrupted camera movement gives the film a truly subjective viewpoint.  By subjecting us almost exclusively to Riggan's point of view, Birdman taps into the deep psychic concept which Slavoj Zizek describes as "anxiety".  It's the underlying fear, in every person, that we are not significant, or that the position or station we perceive ourselves as holding in the world is not authentic or sincere.  Trapped, for the most part, in Riggan's consciousness, the viewer cannot help but share in his anxieties.  Is the play as bad as it seems?  Is it worse?  Is it even real?

The opening scene, where Riggan whirls from his dressing room through conversations with his lawyer (Zack Galifinakis) and his recently-rehabbed daughter Samantha (Emma Stone) and onto the stage, highlights the ambiguities of turning performance on and off, and of the bizarre layers of authenticity that envelop the film.  Is he performing in his dressing room, alone with Birdman?  Does he start performing when he emerges and has conversations with other people?  Or is it when he's on stage?

The troubled, weaselly Shiner is obsessed with performance but does not have a very nuanced view of it.  Fixated on authenticity, Shiner feels like he can only come alive when he's performing his life in front of an audience.  When Riggan replaces his gin with water at a preview screening, Shiner breaks character and berates Riggan in the middle of the show.  "Does anybody give a shit about truth other than me?" he screams.  In an on-stage sex scene with Lesley, he tries to rape her; apparently they haven't had sex in months but he sprouts a raging erection on stage.

For Shiner, the theatrical stage is the only stage, but by ruthlessly trying to inject authenticity into the proceeding, he's completely missed the point.  What he doesn't realize, and what this film does, is that truth and performance are basically the same thing - we are always performing, whether for ourselves or for others, whether on stage or in the dressing room, alone with our thoughts.  

Headhunters

The lead in the Norwegian export Headhunters has a serious Napoleon complex.  Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) may be one of Norway's most successful "headhunters", or high-end corporate recruiters, but the first thing he tells us about himself is that he's 5,6' - not tall enough, he thinks.  Roger suffers from a general sense of inferiority.  He worries that he doesn't make enough money to support a luxuriant lifestyle for his statuesque wife, so he steals expensive art from his clients to make ends meet.  Even still, he's gone into debt to keep their sleek, elegant house, but Roger sees this pampering as a requisite for his marriage.  After all, there are always plenty of men taller than 5,6'.

Headhunters is much more secure in its modest stature than Roger, and better for it.  A twisty and slickly executed thriller featuring a compromised, flawed man on the run, this Morten Tyldum film benefits from a desire not to reinvent the wheel, but to have some bloody-minded fun nevertheless.  The film benefits in particular from a black sense of humor, the occasional stroke of mad genius and a surprisingly comforting quality.

Roger interviews candidates in his capacity as a corporate recruiter; while doing so, he verbally scouts their art collections.  He asks them if they own any expensive art by way of an anecdote, and also asks if they have a family at home (in case anybody might disrupt the theft).  Roger has a partner, Ove (Elvind Sander) who dismantles the alarms before Roger goes in and steals the artwork personally.  One wonders whether these methods would work on repeat; I can picture corporate victims of art theft recounting the story of the headhunter who always uses the same weirdly specific artwork anecdote.

Indeed, Roger's transparency gets him into trouble.  At the opening of her art gallery, Roger's wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) introduces him to the dashing Clas Greve (Jaime Lannister), whom Roger immediately recognizes as an excellent candidate for one of his biggest clients, a GPS company called Pathfinder.  At their next meeting, he also realizes that Clas is in possession of a valuable piece of art, making him a prime candidate for Roger's night job.  Roger steals the art, but Clas smells a rat immediately.  Inconveniently, it turns out that Clas, besides being devastatingly handsome and charming, is also ex-special ops; for the diminutive Roger, cat and mouse becomes a fitting term.  When he realizes he's been outed, Roger hits the road, but not before discovering Diana's phone in Clas's bed.  Under the impression that he's been betrayed by everybody he knows (and frazzled by Clas's mysterious ability to track him down wherever he goes), Roger goes completely underground.

The film plays to these dramas with varying degrees of sincerity.  Confident and rugged, Nikolai Coster-Waldau is perfectly cast as a deviant threat to Roger's insecurities, but descends into something of a stock bogeyman after the first act of the film.  As a sly mystery thriller, however, Headhunters does well for itself, buoyed by a few genuinely inventive action pieces and kept limber by Tyldum's taste for blackly comic violence.  During one scene in particular, at a remote wooded farmhouse where Clas has cornered Roger, Headhunters hurtles into slasher tropes with a self-aware flair that '90s-era Wes Craven would admire.  Especially gruesome use is made of a tractor, and not in the way you expect.  It is sequences like these, of grisly violence with a streak of winking black humor, that get you to realize that this is a warmer film and in better fun than the austere, menacing set decoration and high-stakes set-up suggest.

This warmth comes through the most in Roger and Diana's relationship.  It appears as though the film is setting up Roger's liberation from his icy, conniving wife, but this plot thread takes an unexpectedly tender twist, one that teaches Roger the simple but important lesson of being comfortable with who you are.  A story about a marriage as much as anything else, Headhunters turns into a fast-paced exercise in violently ridding oneself of personal demons rather than succumbing to them.  It's a welcome alternative to interesting but increasingly predictable Breaking Bad-inspired sagas of mild-mannered men turning to the dark side.  That Headhunters nevertheless has some twisted fun on the way to real reconciliation makes it an odd mix of the kind-hearted and the breakneck.  You'll enjoy yourself and you might even get a feel out of it.  

Mamma Mia!

Mamma Mia! is like a musical class clown, trying over and over and over again to impress.  Last song didn't quite stick it with you?  Don't worry, there's another in two minutes!  The film is best characterized by its boundless desire to please, its relentless efforts to get the viewer to have as much fun as the cast is having - a nigh-impossible achievement, by the looks of it.  The star-studded cast - which includes, just for the headliners, Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard - all got together to shoot on location on a Greek island, and they look like they had a whale of a time doing it.  Good for them.  I mean that, I really do.

This is a film adaptation of a Broadway musical that itself is based on the music of the Swedish pop band ABBA.  Sophie (Seyfried) is the sunflowery daughter of Donna (Streep), the ex-hippie who runs a shambling hotel on a Greek island.  Donna is all work and no play these days, but she used to be quite the opposite.  The summer that Sophie came along, Donna had three successive trysts and has no idea which of the three men is Sophie's father.  But on the eve of Sophie's wedding, she decides that she needs someone to walk her down the aisle, and invites the three unknowing candidates (played by Brosnan, Firth and Skarsgard) for the bash.  The mystery of Sophie's father is the basic agent for the "plot".

Let's just step back and think about what is going on here.  This musical is based on the songs of ABBA, which means that the original playwright Catherine Johnson put a wobbly narrative together that intends to make a story out of independently written songs.  I love ABBA.  This is preposterous.  This is awesome.

Mamma Mia! is a bit too stupid and shallow a movie to capture the true depth of ABBA's music, which doesn't mean that it isn't a blast.  Even its critics must admit this; it has no pretensions of being anything other than it is.  It is a shameless vehicle for the brilliance that is ABBA, with a deeply silly story that nevertheless manages to honor the basic emotions of the songs.  This is one of the few things that is genuinely clever about this movie, and one of the things that carried it for me; as botched as so many of the executional elements of this film unquestionably are, it never betrays the tone of ABBA either.  I wanted little more.

This is pure, exorbitant candy-fluff, and so purely candy-fluff that it is an extremity, an outlier.  It's like the camp movie of romantic musicals.  The actors seem to have been hired more for being game than anything else.  Pierce Brosnan, for example, plays a character who gets some big-ish singing bits, and it's not pretty.  But look at that smile!  It's Pierce Brosnan!  He's having fun, and if he sounds like a airplane engine, at least he's being likable doing it.

I don't what the draw was for these actors, but Phyllida Lloyd (who has very clearly never directed a film before) managed to draw some very appealing presences to fulfill these stupid, stupid roles.  The unstoppable Streep is the key to it all.  This amazing actress, in the face of pure bubblegum material, manages to wring every bit of pathos and subtext out of the role.  Despite everybody having a great time, personnel questions remain.  Why is Stellan Skarsgard passing off as a former hippie?  Why are Julie Walters and Christine Baranski degrading themselves as the two most insipid wannabe cougars on the face of the earth?  The film's idiocy is bursting at the seams.

Enough of it, though, is very good fun.  A lot of the songs stick really well; "Dancing Queen" features weathered Greek ladies abandoning their daily work and joining Meryl Streep in an exuberant number, and "The Winner Takes It All" is rendered in all its resigned anguish by Streep in a situation that merits the powerful song.  The most disco numbers like "Lay All Your Love on Me" and "Voulez-Vouz" benefit from the music-video/party quality of the film.  A few, like "Chiquitita" and the fascinating, ambivalent "Take a Chance on Me," flop completely.  But at the end of the day, it's basically watching a filmed version of ABBA's greatest hits, performed by charming movie stars at the height of their silliness.  For the most part, you ought to know whether or not this film is for you.