We’ve started watching Slings and Arrows, a marvelous Canadian series about the backstage, front office, and under-the-lights complications of a regional theater company as it mounts productions of Shakespeare, with each season built around a single play. The first season was devoted to Hamlet. Season 2, now under way for us, will be about Macbeth. Jeri owns the DVD set, and had frequently used several key scenes in her high school English classes—those powerful moments where the director talks one on one with an actor struggling to bring a part to life.

After our first night of the series, in the midst of my two-month broken-foot hobblement, I decided to watch Birdman, a film I had put on our Netflix queue several weeks ago, not thinking too much about its content, but intrigued by the actors (Michael Keaton and Ed Norton) and the very good reviews it had garnered. (Jeri read the description and decided it would be a little too intense for her.) In one of those weird coincidences that seem, more and more, to be a normal part of my life, it seemed to exactly echo the theme, the camerawork, and the soundtrack of Slings and Arrows. Both are about theater people, several with hugely volatile egos, grappling with the complications of putting on a production; both feature frequent tracking shots through the labyrinthine, cluttered corridors in the bowels of their theaters; and, perhaps most strikingly, both often background their scenes with the improvisations of a solo drummer on the soundtrack.

Birdman is a virtuosic tour-de-force for Keaton, Norton, and its director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu. He manages the illusion of presenting the film as an unbroken two-hour shot. Not only that, the camera is always moving, circling around characters in conversation, following them as they run down a hallway, through a door, out on to a stage, down some steps, out to the street. The characters, meanwhile, engage in lengthy, convoluted, emotionally intense, completely spontaneous and natural conversations, interrupting one another, gesticulating, responding. Periodically, the pace slows for a moment of solo reflection, perhaps with an excerpt of a Mahler symphony on the soundtrack. Then the sound of the drum set returns. There’s a wonderful moment of diegetic-nondiegetic blurring when two characters are walking rapidly down a nighttime city street, arguing about something, passing, after about two blocks, a drummer busking on the sidewalk, and we realize he’s playing exactly the same music we’ve been hearing as background on the soundtrack since even before the characters burst out of the stage door a few moments earlier.

It’s the kind of film where I wanted to stop and rewind periodically to confirm some specific detail of the astoundingly brilliant film-making. But I have to confess that, at about 45 minutes in, when one of the actors yelled at his director that he couldn’t play the scene with a fake gun, I decided I didn’t want to see any more. If there’s a gun, something has to happen with it. Maybe I’m getting too old. One of the scenes in last night’s episode of Slings and Arrows showed an elementary school production of Macbeth. Of course, there were lots of stabbings, and the kids had red streamers bursting out of their costumes to depict the blood. Really? Well, our next DVD of Borgen just arrived, so we’ll probably get back to Danish parliamentary intrigues tonight – so appropriate in this time of Brexit and Trump.