Cinema Verdict Review: Black Swan

Black Swan

OPENING: 12/03/2010

STUDIO: Fox Searchlight Pictures

RUN TIME: 108 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
A film by Darren Aronofsky.

Opening Statement
With a filmography that includes Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain and The Wrestler, director Darren Aronofsky has established himself as a genuine auteur of modern cinema. His latest effort, Black Swan, is likely to be as polarizing as anything he has done, but it’s undeniably an ambitious motion picture.

Facts of the Case
Nina (Natalie Portman, Closer) is a extraordinarily gifted ballet dancer. She has worked tirelessly for years at perfecting her craft, and all of the effort pays off when Nina lands the coveted role of The Swan Queen in her ballet company’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The role is a particularly challenging one, as Nina must essentially inhabit two roles: the graceful, elegant White Swan and the seductive, passionate Black Swan. While Nina handles the former role flawlessly, she has trouble meeting the challenges of the latter. She’s too insistent on perfection to really capture the uninhibited sensuality the role requires. With the aid of a lusty director (Vincent Cassel, Eastern Promises) and a free-spirited fellow dancer (Mila Kunis, The Book of Eli), Nina begins an intense personal journey that may enable her to overcome her fragility and capture the dark intensity the role requires. Unfortunately, this transformation comes at a harrowing price.

The Evidence
Darren Aronofsky has stated that he intended Black Swan as a companion piece to his previous film, The Wrestler. While his earlier film offered a look at the surprising tenderness and warmth behind the violent, rage-filled exterior of pro wrestling, this film offers a look at the brutality, cruelty, jealousy and pain behind the graceful, elegant world of ballet. You could say that Black Swan is a reversed mirror image of The Wrestler, which is appropriate enough given that Black Swan is a film that quite frequently uses mirrors to remarkable (and sometimes unexpected) effect.

As an exploration of duality, the film dismisses subtlety in favor of wildly theatrical symbolism and feverish bombast. I can certainly understand how this might turn off those hoping for nuance and realism, but Aronofsky’s approach to the material is both valid and thrilling. The director is at his most De Palma in Black Swan, reaching a kind of exhilarating resonance by traveling down a path that includes elements of exploitation and operatic excess. It’s a blatantly cinematic film that owes a great debt to other films (most explicitly Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes; that great ballet movie which also has a plot mirroring the ballet within the plot), but it transcends those influences enough to become great on its own terms.

”Perfection isn’t always about control,” Cassel’s director tells Nina. It’s a statement that Nina simultaneously understands and fears, as she yearns for the personal liberation required to play the Black Swan but is terrified of losing her magnificent precision as a result. It’s a brutal, violent inner war that Nina must fight in order to find balance between the two, and this conflict is also captured in Aronofsky’s direction: while the ballet sequences are pristinely choreographed and demonstrate exceptional attention to detail, the entire movie is shot with an alarmingly jittery handheld camera. This does wonders for the effect Aronofsky is attempting to achieve, as there are times when it feels as if the images onscreen might leap right into the audience.

Just as the role of the Swan Queen requires a skilled and versatile dancer, the role of Nina requires a skilled and versatile actress. Fortunately, Natalie Portman is up to the task. Portman has come across as somewhat stilted in her more prominent roles (Star Wars, V for Vendetta), but when a role really demands something of her she’s capable of delivering. In Black Swan, Portman turns in her best performance since Closer — maybe her best, period. She’s excellent as the timid perfectionist who’s still a little girl at heart (her room is filled with stuffed animals), but she slowly captures Nina’s darker side to startling effect. Portman does some of her own dancing as well (she reportedly trained for a year for the role), but the camera is more preoccupied with her face than her feet. In a film filled with relentless close-ups, Portman carries a considerable load using only her alternating expressions of fearful torment and unhinged exhilaration.

The supporting cast is uniformly impressive. Vincent Cassel effortlessly captures the sleaze, intelligence and arrogance required for his role. He’s hit similar notes before, but this performance is a very successful variation on a familiar tune. However, the real surprises come from the ladies. Mila Kunis sinks her teeth into her most substantial role to date as Lily, playing the devil on Nina’s shoulder with wicked glee. Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice) makes the most of a small but important part as the embittered dancer Nina is replacing, while Barbara Hershey (Hoosiers) has a very strong presence as Nina’s overbearing mother.

Closing Statement
While Black Swan will undoubtedly play like a silly, pretentious exploitation film to some, I must admit that I found the experience spellbinding. Aronofsky weaves a compelling web of jealousy, ambition and fear in his film’s first half; then delivers a full-tilt audiovisual thunderstorm in the second. As the film madly rushes towards its dizzying, increasingly inevitable conclusion, I found the same awestruck thrill in the film’s craftsmanship that the members of the audience at the ballet find in the climactic performance. Black Swan is the year’s most audacious film and one of its best.

The Verdict
10/10