The movie Michael Keaton called one of a kind: “I can’t imagine there will ever be another”
When looking at the most impressive career revivals of the 21st century, no one has turned around their star trajectory quite like Michael Keaton.
Keaton had been recognised as a great comedic talent ever since he worked with Ron Howard on Nightshift, but the new century saw him earning less significant parts and being taken for granted, such that the actor deemed he had ruined any chance he may have to earn a serious comeback.
However, everything changed when he was cast by the brilliant Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu to be the star of Birdman, an epic satire about a former superhero actor who is trying to be taken seriously by putting on an ambitious Broadway show, and although the film centres on the fictional character Riggan Thompson, who was once a star of the Birdman films, there were clear parallels to be drawn with Keaton himself, as he had famously played Bruce Wayne in the Tim Burton films Batman and Batman Returns.
Beyond the film’s commentary on the way that Hollywood spits out its promising actors and forces them to play franchise roles that are beneath them, Birdman was unique because of the incredible visual trick pulled off by the acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and it was through sharp editing and clever trickery that the film plays out to look like one continuous shot that is unbroken until the ending.
While this sort of approach had been attempted long before, when Alfred Hitchcock made his classic murder mystery thriller Rope, it had never been seen on a scale quite like that of Birdman, about which Keaton recalled to AnOther, noting how challenging the process was, meaning it could never be done the same way again.
“The logistics were extraordinary,” he said, “You can tell that at first glance. The amount of choreography and specifics was more than I’d ever known, and I can’t imagine ever doing that kind of thing again, because I can’t imagine there will ever be another movie made like this.”
Birdman became the most acclaimed film of Keaton’s career and seemed to take the industry by storm, and even if it’s not surprising that a film that so nakedly addressed Hollywood’s anxieties would resonate with those who made storytelling part of their professional lives, it ended up sweeping the Academy Awards with wins for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and ‘Best Cinematographer’, and even Keaton earned his first ‘Best Actor’ nomination of his career, losing out to Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything.
Regardless, as is with any popular film, Birdman earned some detractors who claimed it was all based on a gimmick, but the lead passionately defended the film and explained why it had to be shot in such a unique way.
“Once I saw it, I realised you couldn’t tell the story any other way,” Keaton explained, “The audience becomes a participant, whether you want to or not. It kind of shakes you off sometimes. Sometimes it lures you in. You can hate this movie, but you have to deal with it. You’re in it. You’re repelled and seduced and shocked and upset, and you laugh. I don’t think it could work another way.”
Beyond shining a spotlight on the difficulties that actors face as they struggle to justify their career choices, Birdman was responsible for launching an entirely new era in Keaton’s career, wherein, if he’s had a better last ten years than any other point in his filmography, then it’s this film to praise for it.
