I feel like I could write blog entries only about Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s film Birdman from now until Christmas. But I’ll try to keep my discussion to just this second post. To see what I have to say about the choice of Raymond Carver’s stories for the play within the film, click here.
Last night I watched John Cassavetes’s film Opening Night. I was tipped off to the connection between these two films by Richard Brody’s article on Birdman in The New Yorker. It’s a really ungenerous review, but it is wonderful for giving a film history context for Birdman.
I always face John Cassavetes’s films with trepidation. This one sat on the counter for a week while we looked for lighter fare to take us through Thanksgiving. Cassavetes’s films are slow and dark, and this one is nearly 2 1/2 hours long. Gena Rowlands (his wife) always gets put through the wringer, and filming her dissembling on screen is Cassavetes’s specialty. In this case, however, I found her mesmerizing to watch. She is so beautiful, and in a film about an aging actress, she is caught at a gorgeous moment of maturity. It is possible she is more beautiful in this film than when she was very young.
In the film, Gena Rowlands plays Myrtle Gordon, who is deeply troubled by the middle-aged character she is cast to play on stage. We follow her through the previews in New Haven before opening night on Broadway as she struggles to understand the role, what it means to her career to play an aging woman, and what it says about her personal and professional life, especially given her prior sexual relationships with her leading man (Cassavetes) and director (Ben Gazarra). She is also haunted by a young woman, a fan who was killed in a car accident after showering love and kisses on Myrtle outside the stage door. This young woman is Myrtle’s alter ego, like Birdman is to Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton).
In Opening Night, Myrtle the great stage actress behaves much like the Edward Norton character, Mike Shiner, in Birdman. The audience applauds every night when she has her first entrance. She breaks character when she can’t light her cigarette on stage (reminiscent of Mike throwing his glass and shouting when his gin prop is replaced by water). She breaks character at other times, too, confronting the actors and audience with her own fragile reality.
People have criticized Birdman for being about a tired trope, the shallowness of fame. That idea is not very interesting. What is interesting, and what I think both these films explore, is the truly dark suggestion that acting is incompatible with real love and relationship. Not fame, but acting itself. Even the most “authentic” actors fall short off stage. Mike Shiner is impotent off stage. Riggan Thomas fails as a father, husband, and even boyfriend. Myrtle Gordon, a childless, middle-aged woman, tries throughout the play to seduce the director and leading man, who rebuff and/or manipulate her for the sake of her onstage performance. Everyone keeps praising her for being “a professional.” Riggan seems to want to connect, but ultimately chooses his Birdman fantasy over reality. Cassavetes offers Myrtle a kind of redemption, but it is only the redemption of a great performance.
Both Myrtle and Riggan, unable to resolve their crises, end up drunken messes, getting out of cabs to enter their respective theaters late on opening night. (Actually, Myrtle is in much worse shape than Riggan, falling down drunk, definitely not “flying” to the theater.)
The Criterion Collection disc of Opening Night includes a conversation with Gazarra and Rowlands. In it, they make clear that the final scene of the film, in which Rowlands and Cassavetes perform the final scene of the play off script, was actually improvised on camera. Gazarra says to Rowlands that he assumed the couple had rehearsed it at home, but she says no, when John said the lines that night, cameras rolling, that was the first time she heard them. “Genius! Brilliant!” says Gazarra.
The “Broadway theater audience” is made up of people at the Pasadena Playhouse, ordinary people– way too young for an actual Broadway opening night, but just right for a group of Cassavetes fans answering a newspaper call! Their response to what actors Myrtle and Maurice are doing onstage playing characters Virginia and Marty is spontaneous. The audience loves the performance, of course– it’s Cassavetes and Rowlands!
In this final scene of both play and film, the two perform a scene about aging and relationship, about people who have been replaced by older selves, a couple that is not sure they even exist anymore. It is clear they are “off script” and there is drunkenness and cigarette smoke and arch facial expressions and lovely stage projection and enunciation– it is theatrical and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. It looks like they love each other, these two, and trust each other, making a total mess of the play and a great success at the same time. We stand with the audience at the end for a grand ovation.
There is a lot of overlap between these very different films. Ultimately, both characters have to come to terms with their “real” selves if they are going to successfully play the roles assigned to them on stage. However, both “real selves” prove to be missing. Myrtle is most real, Opening Night seems to claim, when she is off script but on stage. Riggan’s real self– uh … Drunk on the stoop? Fused to his Birdman persona at the end?
And the two films settle the value question very differently. Riggan ultimately makes the wrong choice– he follows his fantasy alter ego and also performs a self-destructive act for the sake of fame (he’d rather kill himself than get a bad review).
Myrtle Gordon says of her stage character at one point, “I want to know if she wins or loses.” In the final scene, Myrtle triumphs on stage by rejecting the play and “being herself” in all her glorious messiness. She kills off her alter ego before arriving on stage. She engages her fellow actor and the audience at the same time. They know what they are seeing is “real.” She rejects the part but triumphs as a complicated, real woman. Presumably, Myrtle wins. The audience definitely does.