Birdman

"Birdman" is basically two films.  One is a quirky little showbiz comedy.  The other is a character study aiming for something much more profound.  Both films largely fail, but the originality of "Birdman" keeps it captivating from start to finish.

The comedy here is particularly disappointing.  Plenty of films have skewered the vanity of actors, and this one isn't nearly clever enough to make the exercise worthwhile.  This is the kind of movie which thinks a line is funny if you insert the word "balls."  The primary driver of "laughs" is Edward Norton, who plays a brilliant but volatile actor.  It feels like a rerun of Dustin Hoffman's role in "Tootsie," only without the gender commentary and most of the entertainment value.  Norton has a fling with a much younger woman, for reasons that are hard to discern; there's also a passionate kiss between two ostensibly straight actresses, just to add to the "hijinks."

The character study concerns Riggan Thomson, a former actor in superhero movies who's staging a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver book.  Thomson is starting to smell his own bullshit, recognizing his boundless self-absorption and need for approval.  That leads to familiar and somewhat tiresome scenes mapping out what a crappy husband and father he's been.  But it also leads to something more interesting: Thomson is starting to realize how pointless everything is, not just his failures but his attempts to correct his failures.  "Birdman" approaches a dark truth, but the movie takes a coward's way out, aiming for something transcendental that mostly just seems silly.

"Birdman" keeps you interested, though.  The movie is shot as one long take.  While that can be a little distracting--the camera used sometimes jerks a bit when in motion, and an object like a mirror or pole is often used to create the illusion that two takes are actually one--it allows us to roam freely between the stage, backstage, and the actors' dressing rooms.  This highlights the film's most interesting point: the permeability of the actors' onstage characters and offstage lives.  Often it's unclear if an actor's words are lines from the play or his own.

The film's most inspired moment highlights this blending.  Thomson has gotten locked out of the theater, in his underwear, before a pivotal scene in the play.  He strolls down Broadway, reenters the theater, and enters the scene from the cheap seats, all in his underwear.  It's hilarious, brilliant stuff.  The camera then wanders up to an empty hallway and holds for probably close to a full minute.  Finally, we hear cheers, and Thomson reenters the frame walking back to his dressing room.  It's a bold choice, the kind that could only come from a movie as crazy as this one.

Nightcrawler

Sometimes a movie lets you know how far we've come.  I recently rewatched "In and Out."  What was a charming and light comedy about the virtues of leaving the closet 20 years ago feels damn near pointless now, at least for the portion of the audience willing to watch Tom Selleck and Kevin Kline kiss.

"Nightcrawler" feels similarly dated, yet it just came out.  It took me a while to figure out why it feels like a film from 20 or 30 years ago.  Eventually I realized that it largely relates to the running time.  This movie is easily half an hour too long, not because it packs too much in but because it takes its time getting to the point.  We watch so many TV shows and movies now that we're extremely accustomed to cinematic language; we have no problem with shorthand techniques like jump cuts in the middle of a scene to abbreviate time, or cramming exposition into a few quick lines of dialogue.  Writer-director Dan Gilroy mostly eschews that, opting for a slow build to a climax that isn't quite as shocking as he thinks it is.

That gets to the second reason "Nightcrawler" feels dated: its heavy-handedness.  After a year which saw a new moral sophistication in Hollywood, this film is dully insistent on making, highlighting, and underlining its point.  This is a movie about local TV news footage that feels the need to have a character actually say, "If it bleeds, it leads."  There's a character at a TV news station whose entire job seems to be to frown worriedly at morally questionable footage.  Gilroy is aiming for a satire in the vein of "Network," but he doesn't have the verve of Paddy Chayefsky, and even that film got tiresome.

It's a shame, because the titular character is a fantastic creation, brought to terrifying life by Jake Gyllenhaal.  Lou Bloom is basically a sociopath spouting capitalistic bromides.  He delivers his messages with such openness and forthrightness that it's like he's shining a 50,000-watt bulb on the Protestant work ethic and showing how silly it can all be.  If the rest of the movie had had this sense of humor, we could have had "The Wolf of WKRP."