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 (121710) One thing you can say
about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A
through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008
stock-market graph. There was Pi, a grainy black-and-white thriller about a
Jewish math prodigy; then Requiem for a Dream, a hyper-stylized melodrama about
drug addicts in New York City; then
The Fountain, a
grandiose metaphysical nut-out with a time-traveling Hugh Jackman in pursuit of
the fountain of youth; and then
The Wrestler, a
gritty realist tale about the redemption of a burned-out athlete. That
Aronofsky's next project would be a psychological horror movie about a disturbed
ballerina seemed no more or less logical than the notion that he'd adapt Bleak
House as a 3-D musical.
The Wrestler is
one of Aronofsky's best films. So I approached this one with fresh excitement:
Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of
ambition, energy, and scope—a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding
his grasp.
The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan, a movie that combines some truly
stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet
the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the über-ballet movie of all
time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Black Swan is a
dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming
role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never
quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent
Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George
Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent
the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never
told. Though Aronofsky fetish-izes tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he
seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing).
Nina, after a respectable but undistinguished career as a low-ranking dancer,
desperately covets the lead in Swan Lake, a demanding part in which the same
dancer must play the innocent white swan, Odette, and her wicked black double,
Odile. But Thomas gives her to understand, repeatedly and unsubtly, that while
her form is flawless, Nina lacks the inner fire and wildness and all-around
bitchiness to dance Odile. One of Thomas' many refined cruelties is an ability
to fan rivalries among his female dancers, and Nina soon becomes fixated on
surpassing both Beth (Winona Ryder), a veteran female ballerina on the verge of
retirement, and Lilly (Mila Kunis), a sultry, hard-partying younger member of
the corps who seems to possess all the Odilian qualities that Nina lacks. The
childlike and seemingly virginal Nina still lives with her overbearing mother
(Barbara Hershey), a glittering-eyed loon who gave up her own dance career to
have a child and who now spends the day painting creepy portraits in her studio.
And that's all you need by way of setup, since the drama of casting, rehearsing,
and performing Swan Lake is soon engulfed by the drama taking place in Nina's
own mind. Most of Black Swan unfolds in a feverish, lurid dream space that we
can only assume to be a representation of the heroine's subjective
experience—though it sometimes does appear as if something objectively
nefarious, even supernatural, may be happening in those cramped rooms and smoky
rehearsal studios.
The problem at the heart of Black Swan is Portman, who is an incredibly limited
actress, which has been obvious to me since the beginning of her career. The
unearned Oscar nomination for spitting the Patrick Marber dialogue that fit her
mouth so uncomfortably in Closer did nothing to change my mind. From the first
shot of her here, it's clear that this is the same Portman we've seen for years:
a little glassy-eyed, a little scared, and a little petulant, and possibly about
to burst into tears. We know the sum total of her character right away, and part
of my inability to give myself to the film was the sheer impossibility of seeing
whatever it is that's supposed to change Thomas's mind about her.
By moments, Black Swan dabbles effectively in the grisly vocabulary of body
horror. In a scene that recalls Cronenberg's The Fly, Nina finds the skin of her
hand peeling off in long strips. At moments when she's close to finding the
black-swan character, she develops goose bumps that give her flesh the look of
plucked poultry. These scenes have a primal power that, even out of context, can
get your palms sticky with sweat. (Just watch the trailer.) But as the movie
goes on, this visceral imagery of bodily disintegration never finds a dramatic
context to make sense in. Nina is just a collection of neurotic behaviors, not a
character, and nearly all the conflict on screen derives from her victimization
(or perceived victimization?) at the hands of others. We never understand what's
at stake for her as an artist, other than sheer achievement for achievement's
sake. With this movie's curious inattention to the question of why performing
matters to its heroine, it could just as easily be a movie about a girl's brutal
struggle to become Baskin Robbins' employee of the month.
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