Alejandro González Iñárritu
Birdman

I immediately had a premonition, that feeling that causes a rapid depression of the mind, for which there are no attributes to describe its essence. Oh, I don’t love cinema, I detest it! After all, what does cinema mean without drama? Herein lies the problem. One could also develop the Hamletian ontology thanks to the patient contribution of intellectual probity, but what does being and its negative reflection matter if the drama is absent here, I mean silent where the Wagnerian song of heroes from a bygone era vibrated the airs and was deus ex machina? Nothing, and consequently, we cannot savor the fruit of what derives from theater, but which flows immediately to its drift, a sewage that stagnates. In drama, the ingenuity of the dialoguing minds wraps itself, of exchanges and involuntary monologues. The essence, the nourishing pulp is all here, in the magic of significants that unravel on the sides to leave free course to the necessary meanings. If only we could supply, assuming, to the lack of nourishment of this unripe and even fleshed-out fruit called “cinema”! To suppose is the salvific act for the art of drama, for all that wants to narrate words. Unfortunately, the actor is mute, his mind rests in the shadow of the good conscience of those who take pictures: the art of the snapshot, the image that becomes master, to please the eye over the despotic hearing; and the playwright has become a screenwriter, of visual sketches, without a voice; and the director is an overlaid presence, like dust on the lens, and no one knows how to suppose anymore and every similar act. Birdman, a work void of drama, which seems so conscious of it as to have Shakespeare’s Macbeth speak, almost to cleanse its conscience.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage | And then is heard no more. It is a tale | Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, | Signifying nothing.
But no film has ever possessed a nearly sustainable closeness to the art of declamation. And how the verb pleasures itself when supported by chromatic elements and equipped with changing forms, a shifting and swaying of images and masses of things and events, an orgasm for the eyes, while for the mind a placid summer vacation. Here, it is strictly forbidden to use the mind. One must let themselves be entertained, pampered, and the distraction is nearby ready to be approached. Oh, mass culture! Oh, bourgeoisie and wallet and goliath spirit! Noble art, where have you flown away? Return, I want drama and music together, because this modern delirium that pollutes my brain consumes me. Is it anything to learn about the genesis and developments of Thomson’s life, the hero of this film? I believe the answer is negative. Wherever there are madmen, failures, and flighty individuals, pathological neural nuts, I with Italian gesture pass the hand under the chin. The problematic daughter, the talented but evidently empty colleague, like a bag of crunchy fries to a dietician’s eyes, and some vain appearance, and finally, supporting it all, the usual tricks that hit the crowds: nudity, outburst, anger, effect, and magic, all seasoned by the dark and intense light that stimulates our limbs. When we witness this nothingness, the director thinks and says: “To future generations the arduous sentence”. And I anticipate it and cast my stone. The very idea of having a connection with the future that we do not know should induce the creator not to give the works too modern tones so as not to confuse posterity, not to inform them of current shames, like the singer with blonde locks that makes young girls in bloom dream; yet he was mentioned, named. For this reason, there is no sense of responsibility, of visions in grand style in our current culture. But what can I expect from this highly dilated communication? An alternative, just an alternative, and only in this sense does this film take flight and fly away, wherever it wishes to hover. Well yes, dear Birdman, I have already forgotten you.