‘Birdman’: Critics flock to praise Michael Keaton black comedy

“Birdman,” Alejandro G. Inarritu’s black comedy starring Michael Keaton as a washed-up superhero actor trying to get his mojo back with a Broadway play, has been in fine feather since debuting to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival in August.

Now playing in New York and Los Angeles, “Birdman” is garnering another round of praise, with critics commending Keaton’s bravura performance and Inarritu’s precise yet dynamic direction.

The Times’ Betsy Sharkey says Keaton and Inarritu “know precisely how to calibrate this flight of fancy for maximum effect,” and the resulting “surrealist portrait of modern times and the cult of celebrity is brilliant on so many levels that even the occasional downdraft can’t keep ‘Birdman’ from soaring.”

The film has “an incredible troupe of supporting players” — among them Edward Norton, Emma Stone and Zach Galifianakis — Sharkey says, but “‘Birdman’ belongs to Keaton. It is one of those performances that is so intensely truthful, so eerily in the moment, so effortless in making fantasy reality, and reality fantasy, that it is hard to imagine Keaton will ever be better.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern says Inarritu has directed the film “con brio,” while “Emmanuel Lubezki’s friction-free cinematography constitutes a virtuoso turn in its own right in a production that’s strewn with superb performances, some of them loud and bold, others subtle and restrained. (Mr. Keaton is, remarkably and often simultaneously, loud, bold and subtle.)”

Morgenstern continues: “Whether ‘Birdman’ adds up to more than the sum of its bedazzlements is open to question — I think it does — but there’s no question that the film gets at various flavors of modern madness with an intensity that can be punishing, but never less than fascinating.”

USA Today’s Claudia Puig says “Birdman” is “one of the year’s most audacious, savagely funny and unpredictable films,” and she also invokes the V word (“virtuoso”) to describe the craftsmanship.

Keaton, for his part, is “pitch-perfect as a man in the throes of an existential crisis,” Puig says, as the movie “plunges the audience into a state of riveted, heightened apprehension, then catapults viewers to bizarre heights. It can be exhausting but supremely exhilarating.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis calls “Birdman” a “big bang of movie razzle-dazzle” as well as a “funny, frenetic, buoyant and rambunctiously showboating entertainment in which Mr. Inarritu himself rises high and then higher still.”

It represents “a nice change of direction” for a filmmaker known for weighty, multistranded dramas (“21 Grams,” “Babel,” “Biutiful”), Dargis says, as “a newly generous Mr. Inarritu has made room for the audience’s pleasure.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty adds, “I was so all-in on Keaton’s vanity-free, go-for-broke metamorphosis I would have followed him, or the movie, anywhere. Which is pretty much where it asks you to go. ‘Birdman’ is a scalpel-sharp dissection of Hollywood, Broadway, and fame in the 21st century. But more than that, it’s a testament to Keaton’s enduring charisma and power as an actor. He soars.”

Not every review has praised “Birdman,” though detractors are certainly in the minority. One, the New York Observer’s Rex Reed, says Keaton is “the best (i.e., only) reason to suffer through a miserable load of deranged, deluded crap masquerading as a black comedy.” For good measure, he adds, “ I can find nothing good to say about any shard of the pretentiousness on view here.”

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