A Red Cape I Covet Plus (SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!) Birdman

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I saw a scarlet winter cape and a matching hat at a little store in Rhinebeck. They were the first articles of clothing I’d coveted in a long time.

The cape was really lightweight.

“Can it actually keep you warm?” I asked the little hippie salesgirl.

There are a few towns where hippies are not quite extinct yet. Rhinebeck is one. New Paltz is another.

“It really can,” said the little hippie salesgirl. “See, it’s made of polar fleece. Same stuff they make those sub-zero sleeping bags out of.”

Hippies by definition are always under 30. Maybe that’s why there are so few of them. On their 30th birthday, they metamorphose into something else.

Lifetime underachievers, maybe?

I used to be a hippie.

The light was so incredibly golden that afternoon in Rhinebeck, I felt like I was in one of those Italian Renaissance paintings. Or maybe a Turner landscape.

We ventured into this little store that sold nothing but olive oil, balsamic vinegar and flavored sea salts. How pretentious, I thought until I started sampling the merchandise on little cubes of artisan bread, and it was beyond divine. I could have eaten an entire loaf of bread dipped in basil-infused olive oil seasoned with lemon balsamic.

Then we went to see Birdman.

Birdman reminds me in some ways of Beetlejuice, which was one of my favorite movies back in the day. Only partly because Michael Keaton is in both.

Birdman also reminds me of Donnie Darko, All About Eve, and that final long tracking scene at the end of Goodfellas, the scene that keeps the film from being Just Another Gangster movie because when Henry Hill’s paranoia is splayed naked on the screen for everyone who actually has eyes to see, his life becomes a mythic odyssey.

Anyone with an interest in filmmaking needs to see Birdman purely as an exercise of what can be done with a camera. The film is stitched together to look as though it’s one continuous take! I mean, it couldn’t possibly have been shot that way, but there are absolutely no transitions between the various scenes, the camera merely wanders around another corner or down the next hall, and picks up another character – sometimes the same character, usually Riggan Tompson (Michael Keaton) – only he’s doing something else. It’s kinetic, disorienting, exhilarating and utterly amazing.

The plot is standard Hollywood fare – fading Hollywood action star (shades of Keaton himself, a two-time Batman) decides to make a bid for respect and so throws all his money into producing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play. The play is a theatrical version of (yuck, yuck, yuck!) Raymond Carver’s short story, What We talk About When We Talk About Love. The action takes place as the play is previewing.

Edward Norton has a hilarious turn as a Bad Boy method actor and I totally forgive Emma Stone for The Help because her foul-mouthed Walter-Keene-painting-come-to-life performance in this was just so riveting.

But my deep affection for Birdman doesn’t come from its uniformly strong acting, or an appreciation of the movies it reminds me of, or because the idea of a Broadway show based on a short story that’s so canonical that it’s now actually trite is so funny to me, or even because of my amazement at its camera work. No.

About four-fifths of the way into the film, Riggins begins tottering on the edge of a breakdown and he goes out and begins walking around NYC late at night.

Now I like to walk around NYC late at night. It’s kind of as though if the Miles Davis album So What? were a landscape. Something about the silence and the blackness in one spot, the pulsating lights and raucously partying crowds 100 yards away. The whiff of a distant river in a completely artificial landscape. Loneliness, exhilaration. It makes me feel intensely alive. It makes me see. It’s like living simultaneously in the exact instant that one empire is dying and another is being born.

I can’t describe it very well, but then it turns out that neither can anyone else because I have never, ever read a description of this experience, or seen a visual representation – though, as I say, some music comes close. So What? Also Davis’s hard-to-find soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafau.

But Birdman completely catches this experience in that short montage as poor Riggins goes utterly mad. From the moment he walks out of that strange little store strewn with pepper lights to the moment he wakes up on a brownstone stoop the following morning.

I was shell-shocked watching it.

After Riggins wakes up, of course, he’s completely mad and the angry Action Hero he turned his back on 20 years ago manifests itself fully. Birdman! The most ridiculous action hero evah!

As though walking through New York City late at night was a conjure ritual or a dip in the Ganges.

Maybe it is.

There’s a beautiful ambiguity, too, to the ending of this film when Riggins – believing his apotheosis into Birdman is complete – leaps out an open window. His daughter comes into the room, doesn’t see, sees the open window. Panics. Looks down at the ground with a horrified expression on her face and then looks up at the sky, and a small smile plays on her lips…