The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alejandro González Iñárritu · a film · 2014 · about 119 minutes · written with Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo · photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki
Mode
Backstage comedy of ego made as one apparent continuous take; farce, satire and magical realism inside a realist theatre picture
Mythos
The double, the costume that speaks in the hero’s own voice; Icarus in the falling fire, the bird’s name and the ledge; the actor’s death and rebirth before an audience
Phase
The days of previews to opening night in and around one Broadway theatre, time folded inside the take; a prologue of images and a hospital room outside it
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 119 minutes, shot digitally, its joins hidden; a score for solo drum kit with existing concert music; a play by Carver staged within the frame
Register
From a falling light and a locked-out actor in his underwear to a real pistol on a stage; the camera’s even motion and the drums under all of it
Scale
One man’s divided mind, a family, a company of actors, a theatre, a critic and the economy of fame, on a single block
Governing Proposition
An actor once famous as a winged hero in a costume stakes what is left of his name on staging Raymond Carver on Broadway, and is followed through the days of previews to opening night in what appears to be a single unbroken take. The wager of the film is that a man whose life has been spent being seen cannot tell love from admiration, and that a camera which never cuts away can show a life with no offstage, until the one moment the performance becomes real.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens before its take begins. A ball of fire falls through the sky; jellyfish lie stranded on a beach; and the text of Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” is set on the screen. Then the camera finds Riggan Thomson in the theatre, and does not appear to cut again for nearly two hours. The fall in the prologue is the image the rest of the film is built to answer: a man who wants to fly, and the fire that falls.
Riggan, played by Michael Keaton, was once famous as Birdman, a winged hero in a costume, and has turned from the franchise to adapt, direct and star in Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” at the St. James Theatre on Broadway. A voice speaks to him, his own voice in a deeper register, the voice of the costume, telling him he was greater in the mask than he will ever be on a stage. It seems to come from a poster of the hero. On his mirror is tucked a card that begins by saying a thing is a thing, and the man who looks into it is nothing but what is said of him.
Alejandro González Iñárritu made the film in 2014 from a screenplay written with Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo. Emmanuel Lubezki photographed it, Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione edited it, hiding every join, and Antonio Sánchez scored it for a solo drum kit, alongside existing concert music. It opened the Venice festival in August 2014 and was released in America in October, and it won the Academy Awards for Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and Cinematography. It is in colour, shot digitally, about 119 minutes long, and survives in one version, which is the one judged here.
Movement II
The film’s first movement is a rehearsal and a falling light. Then Mike Shiner arrives, played by Edward Norton, an actor of real brilliance and complete odiousness. In the previews he drinks real gin onstage and breaks the scene, and later plays a love scene with an erection. He wants everything on the stage to be real. Mike is the film’s second finding and its least noticed: a craft wholly true on a stage and wholly false off it, so that the most honest man in the theatre lives nowhere.
The camera never leaves the building for long, and in its company there is nowhere to rest. It walks the corridors behind Riggan, turns into dressing rooms, climbs to the roof and comes down onto the stage, so that stage and backstage are one space and Riggan is never off. Nights pass in a pan across the sky, and the days of the previews are felt as one sleepless state. The drums follow the walking, keyed to footfall and nerves; once the camera passes a drummer playing in a corridor, and the score is seen. The form is the instrument of what the film knows: a man with no offstage.
The take also asks to be admired. In the long corridor passages it is a display of making as well as a way of knowing, and some of the walking marks time between scenes. Around the spine of the play and the previews the film carries parts it could lose: Laura’s pregnancy, announced and dropped; a kiss between Lesley and Laura in a dressing room, an episode rather than a turn. Naomi Watts as Lesley, Andrea Riseborough as Laura and Zach Galifianakis as Jake, playing straight against type, fill a company that the film needs more as witnesses than as people.
Movement III
Sam, Riggan’s daughter, played by Emma Stone, is just out of rehabilitation. She gives him a tirade about relevance and the internet: the world, she tells him, has moved on to a feed he does not live in. She carries the film’s plainest truth, and her tirade is one of its weaknesses too: the argument about fame is made in speech. On the roof she and Mike flirt, a scene prettily played that repeats what the film says elsewhere about who is real and who performs.
Then Riggan’s robe is caught in a stage door as it shuts, and he is locked out in his underwear in the middle of a preview. He walks through Times Square to get back in. The walk turns humiliation into a terrible grandeur: a man in his underwear parting a crowd of phones, filmed by all of them. The clip goes viral, and makes him relevant as his play never did. The film’s satire of fame is at its sharpest here, where it is shown and not said.
In the dressing room Sylvia, his ex-wife, played by Amy Ryan, tells him in substance what the film has already shown: that he has confused love with admiration. It is the film’s disclosure, and it holds. The film makes it plain before she says it, in a man who addresses a mirror and hears a voice from a poster. That the sharpest line is given to a character to say is what keeps the disclosure from the height it could reach. The Carver frame raises a question about love, and the film answers it mostly as a question about attention.
Movement IV
In a bar Riggan meets Tabitha Dickinson, the critic, played by Lindsay Duncan, who passes sentence on his play before she has seen it. The scene states a quarrel the film has already staged, and the critic is a straw figure: she speaks in the film’s editorial voice, not the world’s. The satire is broad here, and the writing thin, in a film whose camera and players are exact.
Afterwards Riggan steps off a ledge and flies. He soars above the avenues while explosions and a mechanical bird stage below him the blockbuster he refused to make, and the voice of the costume urges him on. It is a real lift, and the film undercuts it at once with a taxi driver chasing an unpaid fare. Elevation comes often in the film and is almost always treated this way, reached and then withdrawn, because the film distrusts its own exaltation.
The flight belongs to one law that the film keeps throughout. Everything in it is performance before witnesses, and the magic obeys that law too: Riggan moves things with his mind only when he is alone, or believes he is, so that whether anyone sees is the question the whole film asks. Farce and despair are held in one physics, the falling light, the gin, the erection onstage and the locked door on one side, and on the other what Riggan is about to do before an audience.
Movement V
On opening night Riggan carries a real pistol onto the stage and shoots himself before the audience, which rises to its feet. It is the one moment of dread in the film without irony. The contest between Riggan and the costume, which has run since the first frame, ends here, and so does the take: after the shot the film breaks into a short run of cut images, the first cuts since the prologue. The performance has ended in the real, and the form registers it.
Riggan is alive, in a hospital room, his nose rebuilt. There is a window. Sam comes to it, looks down, then up, and smiles. The ending has been argued since release: whether he flies, dies, or is seen flying only by a daughter who wishes it. The coda, outside the take, sits on the edge of the system the film has built, and its question is single and open, not a depth.
The film holds one man’s divided mind, a family, a company at work, a theatre and its critic, and the economy of fame, and nothing beyond the block they share: no larger society, no history, nothing of the sacred except that window. Its swerve was real and its road mapped, by Rope, by Russian Ark, and by Lubezki’s own long takes in Children of Men, which stands at 8.4. What it has is a form that knows its subject, a man who cannot stop being watched, and a single cut, placed where the watching becomes real.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the spine holds: the play, the previews, the opening, Riggan’s need to be taken seriously and the voice that tells him he was greater in a costume. Around it much could go. Laura’s pregnancy is announced and dropped. Lesley and Laura’s kiss in the dressing room is an episode, not a turn. Sam and Mike’s rooftop scene repeats what the film says elsewhere about who is real and who performs, and the critic’s scene in the bar states a quarrel already staged. The take cuts both ways: nothing can be cut around, but the camera must walk corridors between scenes, and some of the walking is filler. The ending is required by the conceit of flight. A tight spine carrying detachable parts, just below the line of necessity.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What the film opens is the confusion of love with admiration in a man whose life has been spent being seen, and it shows this before anyone says it, in a man who addresses a mirror and hears a voice from a poster. Sylvia says it to him in the dressing room, in substance, only after the film has made it plain. The second disclosure is truer and less often noticed: that Mike’s craft can be wholly real on a stage and wholly false off it, so that the most honest man in the theatre lives nowhere. What holds it: Sam’s tirade about relevance, the critic’s sentence passed unseen and the viral clip make the argument about fame in speech, and the critic is a straw figure.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation comes often and is almost always ironised. The flight over Manhattan, Riggan stepping off a ledge and soaring above the avenues while explosions and a mechanical bird stage the blockbuster he refused, is a real lift, undercut at once by a taxi driver chasing an unpaid fare. The walk through Times Square turns humiliation into a terrible grandeur, a man in his underwear parting a crowd of phones. The opening-night shot onstage, the pistol real, the audience on its feet, is the one moment of dread unqualified. The drums give rise and fall throughout, and the last shot, a daughter at a window looking down, then up, is a small transport. Height reached many times and seldom held, because the film distrusts its own exaltation.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The double bears the load. Birdman, the costume that speaks in Riggan’s own voice in a deeper register, is the shadow self who tempts him with power and despises his art, and the film is built as a contest between them that runs to the shot and ends there. Icarus is evoked in the falling fire of the prologue, in the bird’s name and in the ledge, and the ending turns the fall into an ascent that the film declines to confirm. The actor’s death and rebirth before an audience, the self given for the play, is enacted with a real bullet. What holds it: the double is also a joke about a particular star’s career, the Icarus figure stays a set of images, and Carver’s lovers lend a second myth the frame does not carry far.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The departure is three wagers at once. A comedy of backstage manners shot as one unbroken movement for nearly two hours, every join concealed. A score for a solo drum kit by Antonio Sánchez, improvised against the picture, the drummer sometimes seen in the frame, in a corridor. Magical realism, a man moving objects with his mind, carried without explanation inside a realist theatre film. The stake was real: a studio picture on a modest budget built on a conceit that leaves no coverage and no recourse in the edit, with a lead whose casting risked turning the whole into a gag. What holds it below the gate: the road was mapped, by Rope (1948), by Russian Ark (2002) and by Lubezki’s own long takes, and the backstage comedy of ego is an old form.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Substitute ordinary coverage and the film loses what it knows. The unbroken take makes stage and backstage, theatre and street, one continuous space, so that Riggan is never off: there is no cut in which he could rest or be someone else, and no place outside performance. Time folds inside the take, nights passing in a pan across a sky, so that the days are felt as one sleepless state. The single break comes at the gunshot, when the performance ends in the real, and the film then cuts: the form registers the event. The drum score, keyed to footfall and nerves, makes the take a pulse. Where the form holds less: the take is also a display of making to be admired for itself, and in the long corridor passages it is container as well as instrument.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence over twelve years, and it is of debate more than of deepening. The ending has been argued since release: whether Riggan flies, dies, or is seen flying only by a daughter who wishes it. The Birdman voice is read as illness, as the self, as the industry. The film’s reflexivity, an actor once famous as a winged hero playing an actor once famous as a winged hero, gives each viewing another layer of mirror, and the joins, the blocking and the choreography reward a second look as craft. What holds the figure: the meanings are largely visible on a first viewing, many of them spoken, and the open ending is a single question rather than a well. The forecast is modest.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that a mainstream feature could be made as one apparent movement and that a percussion score could carry a narrative picture, and it joined the auteur’s backstage comedy to the decade’s quarrel with the superhero franchise at the moment that quarrel was loudest. That is a strong synthesis rather than a reorganisation of what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide circulation, and a share in the vogue for the long and the single take that followed, in which Victoria (2015) and 1917 (2019) stand, though how much of that vogue is this film’s and how much Lubezki’s earlier work is open; the drum score was imitated more than the form. Awards are presence, and are credited nothing here.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across twelve years. The film survives whole as released, in one version, made digitally; nothing is lost. Presence is wide for its age: the Academy Award for Best Picture brought exhibition, television, streaming and teaching, and the film is still discussed, but presence earns little and fame proves nothing of permanence. The surface is charged: the film is fixed to 2014 in the superhero franchise it mocks, in the viral clip, in social media as Sam explains it, and in a particular actor’s career, much of which already reads as period. Twelve years can only be weighed on what twelve years show, and the charged surface holds the figure below the top of what that span allows.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with the invention credited under The Swerve. The command is high and load-bearing. Lubezki’s camera moves through corridors, dressing rooms and stage with actors timed to the inch, light carried from tungsten backstage to the footlights to the street at night, the joins invisible on ordinary viewing; Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione’s hidden cuts are exact; Sánchez’s drums follow nerves. Michael Keaton holds a man between vanity and collapse in a face seen from inches away for two hours; Edward Norton makes Mike’s brilliance and odiousness one; Emma Stone’s Sam carries the film’s plainest truth. The costs are in the writing: dialogue often on the nose, speeches that state the theme, and a critic written thin.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce, a falling light, an erection onstage, a door locked on a man in a robe, and an attempted suicide in front of an audience. They obey one law: everything in the film is performance before witnesses, and every humiliation and every act of courage is staged. The magic obeys it too, since it is seen only when Riggan is alone or believes he is, until the last window; the film keeps its own rule about who sees what. The range is wide and governed by the drums and the camera’s even motion. What strains the law: the satire of the critic and the speeches on social media speak in the film’s editorial voice rather than the world’s, and the hospital coda, outside the take, sits on the edge of the system.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Held in one structure: one man’s consciousness, divided and possibly ill; a family, an ex-wife and a daughter just out of rehabilitation; the labour of a company putting on a play, its money, its lawyer and producer, its understudy; the institutions of art, the critic and the theatre; the economy of fame, the franchise and the feed. These are integrated by the take, which moves among them without a cut. What holds the figure lowest: there is nothing beyond the theatre district and the self, no larger society, no history, nothing of the sacred except the window. The film is a chamber of mirrors on a single block, and its scale is the scale of its subject.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.3, then The Swerve at 8.1 and The Living Form at 8.0. A camera timed to the inch through corridors, dressing rooms and stage with every join hidden, and a lead held in close view for two hours; three wagers placed at once, the hidden-cut take, the solo drum score and an unexplained magic, on a studio picture with no recourse in the edit; and a form that makes stage and street one space, so that the hero is never off, until the single cut falls at the shot.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: a man’s mind, a family, a company, a theatre and the fame economy held together on one block, with no larger society, no history and nothing of the sacred. Below the rest, The Bottomless Well at 7.3, twelve years of debate over a single open ending and meanings largely given on first viewing; then The Inevitable at 7.4, a tight spine carrying a dropped pregnancy, a dressing-room episode and a critic’s scene that restates a quarrel already staged.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 against a threshold of 7.5, a tenth short. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Swerve at 8.1, The Unconcealment at 7.7, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, The Imperishable at 7.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Bottomless Well, 7.3, and The Inevitable, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires; what holds it below Tier IV is a disclosure partly declared, a myth half built, a reach not yet its own, and a scope no wider than its block.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) as released in 2014, the one version, in colour and shot digitally, about 119 minutes, from the prologue of images to the hospital window: directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu from a screenplay by Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo, photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, edited by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione, with a drum score by Antonio Sánchez; with Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan and Lindsay Duncan. It opened the Venice festival in August 2014 and was released in America in October. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The dialogue is described, not quoted, and the card on Riggan’s mirror is given only in substance. The awards are recorded as presence and credited nothing. Facts that could not be verified, among them the titles of the concert pieces used beside the drum score, the number of scenes, and how far later long-take features drew on this film rather than on its photographer’s earlier work, are not given or are stated as open.