Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/29/10
Barring
a lottery win or medical catastrophe in these last 48 hours, when I think
back on 2010, I'll remember it as the year when I got into community theater.
And, much as my appreciation of the movies and TV deepened when I started
writing screenplays about 20 years ago, so too has acting given me new
insights when watching others do it. But there's no movie I've seen
since beginning to trod the boards that has benefited more from my actor's
perspective than Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. While just
about anyone should appreciate this nifty feature-length Twilight Zone
about a ballet dancer's mental collapse under the weight of her big break,
it's a movie that has an extra level of fascination for anyone who's ever
tried to find a character inside themself. Aronofsky's typical sense
of place and strong grasp of the dynamics of obsession are on full display,
and a first-rate cast is led by Natalie Portman giving the performance
of a lifetime as the unraveling ballerina. Black Swan is everything
an “art flick” needs to be in this era of indifference to traditional drama:
enjoyable on a surface level as a crackerjack horror flick, on a more complex
one as a psychological study, and finally containing a more specialized
fascination for a niche audience of craftspeople that the average viewer
won't even notice. Which is my long way of saying I loved Black
Swan for different reasons than you might, but I fully expect you to
love it too.
Nina
Sayers (Natalie Portman) has worked all her life to fulfill the dreams
her ballerina mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) gave up to give birth to her.
Living in her mother's home in a perpetual state of adolescence, she has
impressed her company's director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) with her
technique, but never her passion, limiting her to less desirable roles.
But an opportunity has opened with his decision that the company's star
Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) has grown too old: a new star will
be selected for the season-opening presentation of Swan Lake. In
brief, for those (like me) who don't know the story, Tchaikovsky's iconic
ballet tells the story of a girl cursed to live as The White Swan unless
true love returns her to human form. She meets the man of her dreams,
but before her curse can be lifted, her doppelganger The Black Swan steals
him away and she leaps to her death. Sweet, shy Nina is the perfect
choice for The White Swan, but the same dancer must play both roles, and
Thomas doesn't believe she can find the Black Swan within her. When
an aggressive rebuff of his advances leads him to believe otherwise, he
changes his mind: Nina has the role she's waited all her life to
play. But from the first, she finds the Black Swan role eludes her,
and the harder she works at it, the more events around her become disjointed
and strange. Who is the girl in black who looks just like her that
she passes on the subway? What is that weird, ever-growing wound
on her back? And is it just her imagination, or is her new friend
Lily (Mila Kunis) trying to seduce Thomas and steal her role... just like
The Black Swan?
Whether
or not you've ever danced or acted, everyone can feel some empathy with
Nina's dilemma: we've all pushed hard for an opportunity we wanted
and then found ourselves in over our heads trying to actually take advantage
of it. But this is really a movie about acting because what happens
to her is all about trying to tap into a dark side she doesn't have.
Everything about The Black Swan is outside Nina's experience: she's
evil, and Nina doesn't harbor a single ill thought toward anyone; she's
a brazen seductress, and Nina a sheltered virgin; and then, of course,
there's the whole matter of not being human... . Aronofsky, working
from a script by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin, does
a great job creating her flat, joyless world and then filling it with wild
flashes of sexuality, violence and physical revulsion. I've never
seen the clipping of nails seem more horrifying. The movie follows
Nina's point of view, but keep an eye in her peripheral vision, in mirrors,
and at the moments when she's most emotional, and flashes of reality sneak
through. It's always fun in a movie like this to try to guess what's
real and what isn't: Heyman, Heinz and McLaughlin spare us any extreme
Shayamalanesque flourishes, but not everything or everyone is always what
they were just a moment before. We are, after all, inside the head
of a mentally ill woman. And once things come to a head at the Opening
Night performance... well, suffice it to say it's one of the year's most
visually stunning sequences.
The
quality of Natalie Portman's work has always tended to vary in direct proportion
to how challenging it is: while she's rarely able to rise to the
occasion of piffle (while she got better as they went, her work in George
Lucas' Star Wars prequels is often dreadful), she was sensational
in V for Vendetta and here is absolutely
off the charts. Her Nina's impossible to dislike, but also easy to
pity, so filled with the fear of failure every moment of her life that
a psychotic break never seems like a stretch. Even once she begins
to find that elusive Black Swan within her, she never becomes the villain
of her own story: all the poor girl wants to do is give a performance
everyone will be proud of. I've previously worried
on this site that Portman's alarmingly thin, but for better or worse,
she really makes that work for her here. Not only does she look more
like an actual ballerina than just about any actress you could think of,
but the physical vulnerability that comes with being so slight constantly
re-enforces how fragile Nina is.
You
can't ask for more than this from Cassel: I more or less wanted to
slap him every moment he was on screen. Because he never goes all
the way, it's impossible to say whether the way Thomas pokes at Nina's
sexual naivety is designed to seduce her or motivate her performance, but
any sane person could see that he's crushing the poor girl. Of course,
he's also really good at radiating the intoxication with his own ego that
makes Thomas oblivious to any sort of details that don't fall under the
category of “My Genius”. Kunis is pitch-perfect as Lily: it's
hard to be certain what's real and what isn't where she's concerned, but
as near as I could tell through the shroud of Nina's delusions, this is
a girl who'd do anything to get ahead, but considers that “just business”.
The fascination of the character comes from the fact that I really did
believe she wanted to be Nina's friend just as much as she wanted to stab
her in the back. And the joy she takes in doing everything from dancing
to smoking to picking up guys in a bar is such a perfect counterpoint to
Nina's obsessive, gray world that both actresses make each other better.
Hershey is also quite good as her suffocating mother: it only takes
one scene involving a slice of cake to let you see the lifetime of passive/aggressive
abuse that forged her poor, broken daughter. And Ryder is terrific
in a couple of key scenes. We'll never know for sure whether her
final scene is real or imagined, but either way it shook me up pretty severely.
This
has been a terrific holiday season for movies, and Black Swan is
no exception. It presents a rich, horrifying portrait of madness,
delivers as many scares for your ticket price as a horror fan could ask,
and even takes time to bring us ballet heathens up to speed on what Swan
Lake is about. And if you're an actor, it makes an excellent reminder
not to get TOO crazy in the name of your art. And that goes double
for ballerinas. |
