By David Raether
It seems like Michael Keaton will do just about any type of movie, looking at his filmography. Consider the films he made in 2014 alone:
RoboCop. The original RoboCop (1987) was a fun and largely tongue-in-cheek movie. They decided to go for a somber The Terminator (1984) mood for this reboot, and the result was, well, really mediocre.
Need for Speed. While I have missed many movies from 2014, I’m fairly confident this one was one of the worst. It is based on a video game. Never a good starting point.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s brilliant film about an actor trying to save his career and himself. The movie won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay and garnered Keaton his first and only Best Actor nomination.
Crazy, right? As my older son always says when he gets surprising news: “What the heck, man.”
What the heck man, indeed.
Michael Keaton has had a wildly diverse career, and he is always notable in every one of his roles. In fact, he’s created several characters who remain touchstones of contemporary American film, like his manic title character in Beetlejuice (1988) or his moody and low-toned Batman in the first reboot of Batman (1989). Take even his minor role as Captain Gene in The Other Guys (2010). Instead of the stereotypical commanding officer yelling at those wacky guys who don’t follow the rules—a trope that first emerged in the Dirty Harry movies in the 1970s—Keaton’s Captain Gene is a beleaguered bureaucrat who is working a second job as the manager of a Bed Bath and Beyond and just doesn’t want any trouble.
There also is a sort of feral quality to Keaton. He always seems to have more energy than anyone else on the screen. Not blessed with the typical leading man’s good looks, Keaton more than compensates for this by being the most interesting character in any scene. He always comes across as that friend of yours who has way more zip than anyone else, the guy who is always coming up with some new angle on something.
Michael Keaton was born Michael John Douglas on Sept. 5, 1951, in Kennedy Township, PA, a suburban area near Pittsburgh. He was raised Catholic (his mother is Irish Catholic) and attended Kent State University in Ohio, starting there just months after the massacre of students protesting the Vietnam War. He acted in plays and studied theater and then dropped out after two years and returned to Pittsburgh, where he began his TV career on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. That show was a program on the local PBS station there, and Keaton worked as a production assistant and played one of the Flying Zookeeni Brothers.
Keaton later left Pittsburgh and moved to Los Angeles, where he began auditioning for film and television roles, landing guest spots on Maude and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When getting his Screen Actors Guild card, he decided to change his last name because two other SAG members were named Michael Douglas. He chose Keaton as his working name as an homage to Buster Keaton.
His first feature film role was in Ron Howard’s Night Shift (1982), which led to his starring role in the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom. He worked fairly steadily for the next few years, but then his life—and career—took a dramatic turn when he was cast in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) as a frenetic ghost. It was a landmark performance, utterly original and wildly entertaining—with plenty of dark edges.
Burton followed this up by casting Keaton as the lead in Batman (1989). The movie was an enormous hit and Keaton’s performance was widely lauded for bringing unexpected depth to a filmed version of a comic book character.
The ensuing years demonstrated Keaton’s approach to picking his roles, most of which were somewhat surprising. Keaton followed Beetlejuice with the intense family drama Clean and Sober (1988). After Batman Returns (1992), his next picture was a film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993).
One of my favorite pieces of trivia about Keaton’s career is that he played the same character in two completely separate movies. In Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), he played FBI agent Ray Nicollette and then played the same character a year later in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight.
By the early 2000s, Keaton’s career seemed to have stalled out. He was regularly working, but nothing of note was being added to his filmography. Those years included such trifles as Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) and the aforementioned RoboCop (2014). Now, I’ll confess that I really enjoyed the Herbie movie, not because it was a good movie but because it was just a lot of fun. And, yeah, RoboCop was pretty lame, but c’mon, it’s RoboCop. What’s not to like about techno-facsism?
And then, seemingly out of the blue, along came Birdman (2014), followed by Spotlight (2015) and The Founder (2016). Keaton was brilliant in all.
So, what’s next for him? Well, he’s currently filming The Flash, which is due for a 2022 release, in which Keaton is reprising his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman.
With that said, here are five of my favorite Michael Keaton movies to add to your queue.
Keaton plays Jack, a hard-driving executive at the Ford Motor Company, and Teri Garr co-stars as Caroline, his wife and mother of their three little kids. Jack gets laid off during the recession of the early 1980s, so Caroline decides to reenter the workforce to help the family. She becomes an executive at an ad agency, so Jack is forced to take over the household duties: cooking, cleaning, making dinners, etc. And guess what? He’s terrible at it! I have always really enjoyed this movie. It’s good-natured and Keaton is just flat-out hilarious as a dad who has no clue how to be a “Mr. Mom” but gradually winds up pretty good at it in his own unique way—despite some major disasters.
Garr is wonderful in this, more than matching Keaton for laughs and anxiety. Honestly, I just love anything she does. The screenplay is by John Hughes, although it was heavily rewritten (and apparently, the original version was much better). It’s still an absolutely delightful and funny movie.
A signature performance by Keaton, who stars as a ghost hired to drive out new—and still living—residents from a house. But he ends up being a bit too crazy, even for the newly dead resident ghosts who hired him (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin). It’s a somewhat familiar concept for a movie—Topper (1937) is a Cary Grant screwball comedy with the exact same premise. Oh, and Keaton’s wife at the time, Caroline McWilliams, co-starred with Eric Idle(!) in the sitcom Nearly Departed (1983) with an identical premise as well. As Fred Allen once famously said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of television.” What sets this particular version of this story apart is Tim Burton directing, and, of course, Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice. He is a whirling dervish of manic, funny, and unsettling energy.
Burton always brings a striking visual sense to his films and production design. This movie is one of those that every actor dreams of being involved with: “a critical and commercial success.” Time to see this classic once again and revel in Keaton’s performance here. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a treat.
This was the definitive Batman movie until Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight came along. It is worth being reminded that prior to this movie, the screen version of Batman was mainly known as the campy 1960s Batman TV show that starred Adam West. That show essentially was a spoof on comic book pretensions about superheroes, emphasizing the “comic” part of the genre. It was silly and comic book fans completely hated the show. So when it was announced that Keaton would play the lead role, these fans flooded Warner Brothers with letters of protest. They were concerned that Keaton would turn Batman into a Beetlejuice-type of portrayal. However, director Tim Burton stuck to his guns—resulting in a completely new interpretation of Batman that hasn’t relented since.
Keaton’s Batman is a disturbingly unsettling figure. He’s a strange—albeit well-intentioned—rich guy who secretly dresses up as a bat and swoops around the city at night fighting crime. This is truly an excellent performance and one of Keaton’s best. It’s also great to revisit the movie that set the tone for Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. Plus, Jack Nicholson turns in a trademark performance as the Joker. What are you waiting for?
Ron Howard’s sprawling and frenetic portrayal of one day in the life of a daily newspaper in New York City (most likely based on The Daily News). Keaton is the managing editor of the paper and everything in his life falls apart, then comes together in one crazy, tension-filled day and night. Not only is this one of my favorite Ron Howard movies, it’s one of my favorite from the 1990s, period. Keaton’s character has to balance a pregnant wife (Marisa Tomei) who is near her due date, a job interview with the New York Times, and an explosive news story that threatens to tear the city apart along racial lines.
David and Stephen Koepp wrote the gripping and breathless script. Keaton sits atop an enormous cast that also includes Glenn Close, Jason Robards, Randy Quaid, Robert Duvall, Spaulding Gray, Jason Alexander, and Catherine O’Hara, among many others. Strap yourself in and enjoy. This is a glorious movie.
Keaton’s career had sort of fizzled out when this dazzling film by the Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu burst onto the scene. If it seemed too weird to see when it first came out, you would be wrong. It is just weird enough. And moving. And inspiring. And unsettling.
Keaton plays Riggan Thomas, an actor who had once portrayed the superhero Birdman, but whose career has since completely stalled out. (Hmm.) Desperate to prove he can still act and be a star, Riggan decides to stage a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. This is one of those movies where you don’t want to say too much about it while recommending it, not because you’d be revealing plot twists, but because it’s one of those titles that you really should experience it yourself.
This is Keaton’s finest performance and a great reminder of the incredible range and skill he possesses. Of special note is the cinematography by the remarkable Emmanuel Lubezki. This film deservedly won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. Keaton was nominated for Best Actor, while Edward Norton Jr. and Emma Stone received nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Actress. Don’t miss this one.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.