Well, this is a fucking mess.

They had a nice thing going with the long take. I love how it moves from supposed fantasy to supposed reality without cuts -- it changes our entire understanding of how the film-audience relationship is going to work. In terms of form, the film is speaking a foreign language. And then they blur things further by doing the same thing on-stage with the play, comparing and contrasting artistic mediums in the parallel collapses of their "realities."

Too bad about the rest of it, though. This is a frenzied, anxious thing, and while that can work in a laser-focused film like Whiplash, here it just feels inattentive and lazy. For a film that by its very nature is consistently visually coherent, it can't keep its mind on a single idea for longer than five minutes.

Maybe that's the point, and it's supposed to mirror the frantic atmosphere of The BACKSTAGE Of The THEATER. That's fine, I'm totally cool with that. There's just not much to chew on there. And if Birdman didn't come so close to being really fascinating, I'd probably be a lot less harsh on it.