Naomi Watts | 4 Star Films

“It’s the Goonies and Citizen Kane. They don’t distinguish between high and low.” ~ Ben Stiller as Jamie

Although not nearly as prolific, in some respects Noah Baumbach feels like a lesser heir apparent to Woody Allen, if in fact the veteran filmmaker ever stops making films. Nevertheless, Baumbach seems to have a knack for a similar cross-section of New York. Frances Ha is his Annie Hall with the cinematography of an updated Manhattan. Also, his characters are more often than not middle-class intellectuals. People who think, have deep conversations, and yet there still manages to be something funny or different about what they have to say.

While We’re Young begins something like this. There’s a middle-aged couple stuck in neutral scared out of their minds about kids, and at the same time scared of growing older all alone with just the two of them. They have some good friends, who now have a child, and now Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) feel lonely. Then, they meet Darby (Amanda Seyfried) and Jamie (Adam Driver) and phase two begins.

Baumbach proves he really is a different creature entirely, and While We’re Young embodies that with its progression. It’s not quite what we expect. It’s refreshing, lithe, and friendly. Hold that thought. Maybe that’s actually exactly what we wanted and expected — at least for now.

Very quickly these two couples connect on so many levels despite their vast age difference. The old ones feel young and the young ones are really old souls guided by free spirits. They live life as they please without the drudgery that Josh and Cornelia feel weighed down by.

He’s been working on the same documentary for eight years now with the same talking head (Peter Yarrow), and he and Cornelia have hardly been out of the house, much less the country, in the last several years. To make matters worst he feels like he’s living in the shadow of his highly-successful father-in-law (Charles Grodin). In utter contrast, Jamie imbues so much passion it’s hard for Josh to not to latch onto that.

Their friendship blossoms in such a way that Josh and Cornelia almost seem unrecognizable with their hip-hop and fedoras. It’s not obvious quite yet whether that’s a good or a bad sign. But of course, the story doesn’t end that way. Because that’s not life, or at least not the way of real life outside of the world of filmmakers and documentarians.

Darby and Jamie aren’t the perfect young couple they seem to be. Their mish-mash of culture and public domain mentality has a downside. It gets worse than just the Goonies and Citizen Kane. After all, what are we supposed to expect? Two people who build their own furniture, make ice cream for a living, and live off old records and VHS cassettes have faults too.

Something happens that shakes Josh and the audience out of their reverie. In fact, everyone is brought back to earth. The world is often full of lies or worse yet half-truths. Unfortunately, we have to learn to accept them even when it feels so unjust. Joshie learns a valuable lesson about humanity and the younger generations. They aren’t evil and they are far from perfect.

In its finality, While We’re Young wasn’t the pretty picture that we half-expected. In fact, it got downright weird, dark, and deceptive, before giving way to apathy. But that’s okay. Life doesn’t always end there. There’s often a hopeful epilogue and so it goes with Josh and Cornelia.

3.5/5 Stars

In the opening shot, a man is in his tidy-whities levitating in midair. This is one of those films that can never be figured out completely or never fully dissected in its entirety. It’s a meta film on a whole lot of levels. You could say that Michael Keaton is playing a version of himself named Riggan Thomson. He used to be a superstar in the popular superhero series Birdman. That ended back in 1992. Now he’s old and washed up attempting to revive himself in an adaptation of a Raymond Carver play. Robert Downey Jr. is the guy with the type of box office draw that he used to have. He is constantly fighting his own inner demons that play like the voice of the Birdman in his head. The character he used to be is so closely tied to his identity that Riggan has trouble getting away from it.

The film follows the loss of one of their lead actors to an accident, and there is a rush to find someone else before their first preview showing. They want Michael Fassbender or Jeremy Renner and yet they do get lucky in Mike Shiner (Edward Shiner). However, much like Norton in real life, Shiner proves to be a handful, but also a star performer who the public love. Riggan needs him and his best friend and lawyer Jake (Zach Galifianakis) pleads with him to say with Shiner. All the previews are a disaster: Mike breaks character over some gin and he tries to have sex with actress and former lover Lesley (Naomi Watts) on stage. To add insult to injury, Riggans locks himself out of the theater and thus begins his frantic pilgrimage through Time Square in only his underwear.

Riggans wrote, directed, and acts in this play to overcompensate for all his failures. He even refinances his house to cover the cost. He’s spent. His daughter and former drug addict Sam (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and although they don’t see eye to eye, they try to be real with each other. She too is a screw-up, but she sees in him someone who confuses love for adoration. He worries about relevancy, fading away, and he is scared to death that he might not matter. In as many words, she tells him to join the club because every member of humanity has these same fears nearly every day of their existence. He is no different.

Following the final preview, critic Tabitha Dickinson says she will tear his play apart because he is one of those Hollywood celebrities masquerading as an actor. After a rough evening, the Birdman comes back to haunt him before the big opening.

Then, opening night comes and Riggan seems strangely aloof on a night with so much riding on it. He does the unthinkable when in his final scene he uses a real gun and points and fires it at himself. The crowds are as surprised as the viewer before bursting into thunderous applause. Riggan has unwittingly become a sensation on Twitter and on the theater circuit.

The story ends in the hospital with Riggan reconciling himself with his daughter Sam. It looks like it could take a fatal turn because the specter of Birdman still remains, and yet along with Sam we get to see something extraordinary, and at the same time ridiculous, happen. They don’t call him Birdman for nothing.

Birdman has received a great deal of notice for its cinematography that was spliced together to look like one continuous shot. At first, it feels a bit gimmicky watching the camera self-consciously spiral around the actors, but it slowly becomes the routine. It feels like a Goodfellas tracking shot on steroids, and it certainly hearkens back to Hitchcock’s Rope as we often find ourselves following characters from behind down hallways or going from interiors to exteriors. It’s certainly a different perspective of the world.There are moments that it looked like Edward Norton or Emma Stone might steal the show, but by the end, it is still evident that this is Michael Keaton’s film. This is a story about his struggle. This is his version of Sunset Boulevard that he must overcome. It also has an overarching blend of magic and realism that makes it hard to parse through what the true reality is. But by the end that is far from necessary, because this is a meta experience that is layered and inverted in such a way that makes it fascinating. We think we have our feet on the ground, firmly planted, but we never do, and we are never allowed to.

At times it feels rather like we are in Manet’s painting Bar at the Folies Bergere. It becomes difficult to tell if we are in the audience are simply part of the film. We lose ourselves in the metaness that acts as the thin dividing line between what is real and what is fictitious. There is a cinematic magic in that just as there is a kind of supernatural energy in Riggan Thomson himself.

However, he does not get wholly lost in that, because he is a messed-up human being like the rest of us. No matter how mystical he is, there still is an unmistakable resonance to his story. Thomson would be happy to know that he is relevant just like we are all relevant in some way, shape, or form. It’s all subjective. It just depends on who you ask or what critic says what. In reality, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot.

Honestly, it failed to hit me until afterward, Birdman is a humorous film where the humor often gets forgotten behind the more philosophical and human aspects. There’s nothing quite like it. It takes its cues from Sunset Boulevard, Jean-Luc Godard, Dr. Strangelove, Batman and undoubtedly so much more, but it is distinctively the creation of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

4.5/5 Stars