It would take a bit of effort and some fairly tortuous reverse engineering to see “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” which continues in limited release this week and expands next week, as anything but a departure for director Alejandro González Iñárritu, or Alejandro G. Iñárritu as his current incarnation is called. Indeed, formally it’s almost the Platonic opposite of his previous films, seemingly unfolding in one breathless, unbroken take and moving ever forward in time in a manner that, compared to the shifting perspectives and jumbled chronology that characterize the majority of his films, feels refreshingly linear.
Still, one element of his directorial approach remains constant, despite occasionally disheveled structures and blunt thematics: his ability to get very strong performances from his cast. Michael Keaton, whose turn in “Birdman” is truly of the career-relaunching variety (check out our 10 favorite Keaton performances here), is the current poster child in this regard, but in fact he’s now joined a long queue of phenomenal lead performances in Iñárritu’s oeuvre. And that’s not even including supporting actors, who in a lot of cases —thanks in large to Iñárritu’s love of multi-personality storylines— have their moment in the spotlight and then some. So while “Birdman” is an absolute cavalcade of terrific performances, pretty much every one of Iñárritu’s previous films, despite the varying degrees to which we might have embraced them overall, boasts an embarrassment of riches in the acting department.
And so we have sifted through the entire Iñárritu catalog (ok fine, there are only 5 films), and singled out the ten most memorable performances. It was an interesting exercise that at times required a degree of separation of a particular performance from the wider movie it serves, as for many of us, Iñárritu’s catalog between his terrific debut “Amores Perros” and the magnificent “Birdman” has been spotty, occasionally slipping into needless overcomplexity or blunt heavyhandedness. But none of us have ever doubted his consummate talent as a filmmaker, and his latest work is a stimulant, serving as a reinvigoration for both Iñárritu and for his audience (as we said in our review) and as a reminder of how fantastic his cinema can be when material meets performance in pitch-perfect unison. It also reminded us just how often his actors have found a way to bring out their very best for him, like they did especially in the following ten occasions.
Javier Bardem as Uxbal in “Biutiful” (2010)
If we had occasionally wished during Iñárritu’s previous films to see him and his screenwriting ex-collaborator Guillermo Arriaga concentrate on one narrative, rather than trying to weave together disconnected stories based on some thematic similarity or chance collision, 2012’s “Biutiful” came along as a summary example of “be careful what you wish for.” The film’s vehemently poetic mysticism can’t hide a sense of crushing desolation: it’s a story about a dying man mired in ever more desperate and tragic circumstances as fate conspires to pile misery upon misery on him. But its unflinching focus on its central character, whom Iñárritu uses to funnel parallel commentary on social outcasts and the psychological weight of fatherhood, yields perhaps the most extraordinary Javier Bardem performance ever. There is something about Bardem as an actor, even as a physical presence, that works brilliantly here. Perhaps it’s that he commits so totally to a role that progressively strips him of his charisma, his brawn and his vitality —all the things that make him Javier Bardem— that feels so brave. By its close, his Uxbal is little more than a ghost, a hollowed-out shell of a man, having been ground down physically, psychologically, socially, and morally by repeated evidence of his own insignificance until nothing but a pair of soulful eyes and the thinnest thread of hope for his children remains. A prime example of a truly great performance (Bardem was Oscar-nominated and won the Cannes Best Actor award) that is so dominant it casts the entire film in its shadow, the only complaint we could have about Bardem here is that he makes such a relentlessly downbeat film so compulsively watchable that we almost didn’t notice how feelbad it was until it was over.