With Parasite, there's no backlash. It's either too soon, or most people just agree it's an incredible movie. Yeah I have one friend who thinks it's overrated, but I actually think he's the only person I've ever heard say that. "Backlash" is a word that has no practical meaning in relation to Parasite.
With Titanic, it's all backlash, all the time. But I don't care because I still love it, and always will.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) falls somewhere in the middle. Many people still respect it, but there's a vocal quantity who always thought it was a fatuous critique of show business with ostentatious technique that was always designed to call attention to its own brilliance.
Or so they say. See, if Birdman hadn't won best picture, I suspect it would occupy a far less problematic space in their minds.
I finally got to Birdman on Friday night in my 2022 rewatch of all my former #1s. That gets me down to only seven more of the 26 that I need to watch before the end of the year, when I will duel them all in a special Flickchart account to arrive at a definitive ranking.
Although I ultimately wouldn't need four viewings of it by this point -- the second was for pleasure, the third for considering it for the best of the 2010s -- I continue to really like Birdman.
I should probably say "love" -- after all, it did end up as my #21 of that decade. Then again, only one of my #1s from the 2010s (Ruby Sparks) didn't make the top 25, and Birdman was the next closest to missing out -- my lowest ranked #1 in my top 25. (The #1s were bunched up in the middle, as it turned out, as my highest ranked #1, Inside Out, was all the way down at #7.)
In fact, as an indication of how things have shifted, it was bested by two other films I ranked in 2014: #10 Under the Skin, and #14 Boyhood, which was its primary competition for the Oscar that year.
Boyhood has always been a big problem for Birdman in terms of gaining greater popular love, or at least love among cinephiles. Indeed, the former film holds up better on rewatches for me too (just three total viewings for that one, in part because of its ungainly length).
What I fully expected to happen with Birdman was that it would be a critical favorite, but too eccentric to make the Oscar shortlist. Then when it did make that shortlist, I never expected it to become a frontrunner. Even as Oscar night approached and the buzz that it would win became deafening, it seemed more likely to me on some level that Boyhood would pull it out. It had been 17 years since my #1 movie had been named best picture, and I just wasn't used to it.
If Birdman had indeed gone quietly into the night, I think others would like it more today -- including myself.
I can't help but have internalized some of the criticisms of the movie, even if I can't name them for you as readily as I can with other problematic best picture winners (such as Crash and Green Book). I sometime think it's just a vibe people get from Birdman that they don't like, maybe a bit of a "try hard" mentality from director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu -- who in some ways tried even harder the next year with The Revenant. And since has not been heard from again in terms of feature films, though that will change in December, when Netflix streams Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths). (Hey, the parenthetical title worked for him the first time.)
They certainly can't complain about the cast. I think everyone agreed that welcoming Michael Keaton back into the spotlight was a long-overdue revelation (pun intended, as he won best picture again the following year with Spotlight). Birdman showed us that there was never any reason Keaton should have stopped making films we'd heard of for more than a decade. The rest of the cast is filled with actors we all like or love, like Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. (I think people love Norton even if they've heard rumors that he's difficult.)
As for the storytelling gimmick itself, the appearance that the film takes place all in one shot, I think people were lying if they didn't admit this impressed them. If the Oscars aren't a good time to reward daring uses of the form and methods of creating movie magic in front of our eyes, I don't know when would be a better time.
The fears of the increasing irrelevance of a washed up white man? At the time we hadn't yet rightly concluded that this was a narrative perspective that needed to be retired, or at least sent on a long vacation. So you can hold that against Birdman in retrospect, but not so much in early 2015.
The "film industry sucks its own dick" aspect of the film can probably never be removed from it. We know the academy loves films that consider the plight of its own members, as movies about show biz, even if they are not directly about Hollywood, have always done well with voters. And I suppose Birdman really is about Hollywood, even though it's "about" Broadway, since its critique of superhero films is built right in. Then again, you could argue that Birdman has only increased in resonance in that respect, considering how much more superhero movies dominate the box office even than they did eight years ago.
And movies about making movies shouldn't automatically carry a black mark against them. As just one example, Adaptation, another #1 of mine, has never really lost any of its luster -- among those who thought it had luster in the first place -- just because it's so much about itself.
But we'll never know a world where Birdman didn't win best picture, so we can only hypothesize what sort of post-2014 stature it would otherwise have.
For me, four viewings have not been enough to sour me on it, so I doubt an eventual fifth will either. That probably won't come for another ten years now. The technique of Birdman means there has always been a moment while watching it where I felt its length -- only two hours, but with this technique that feels like a lot. Four times in one decade is enough for now.
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