December 7, 2010: Black Swan
I knew I was seeing two movies this day (having just seen 127 Hours), but I wasn’t sure whether I’d be seeing two good ones. I’d been wary of Black Swan because of the ballet dancing and Natalie Portman, but the bold vision of director Darren Aronofsky came close enough to making sense this time around that I found myself impressed far beyond my expectations.
Natalie Portman plays Nina, a devoted New York ballet dancer whose time has come to take over as the next big star. She’s technically proficient and undeniably graceful, but as the casting proceeds for the opera company’s mounting of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, she can’t seem to find her dark side, which she will need in order to passionately portray the character of the Black Swan. The director continues to goad her until she finds the darkness deep inside, but perhaps at the ultimate cost.
Or maybe not. Delirious visions and hallucinations abound, and it becomes clear that the audience doesn’t know any more than Nina knows what’s real and what’s not. Mila Kunis plays a competitor in the ballet troupe who ends up being Nina’s understudy but with questionable motives in getting to know her better. And Nina’s overprotective mother, who pressures her with the ferocity found only in a parent who failed to reach the pinnacle of the same profession, might be ultimately helpful or might be the cause of her downfall. Subtle visual effects shots, as we weave in and out of the visions, serve to blur the line between definite reality and definite dreams as Nina appears to go through a slow physical transformation. I’m not typically into films which explore the supernatural, but Black Swan leaves enough possibilities open that the suggestion of that as one of the options seems entirely reasonable. It slowly becomes clear that Nina was born to play this role and has had it in her mind and her body the whole time, and she just needed to find it within herself.
I’ve never been able to decide whether or not I like Natalie Portman. She burst onto the scene in 1993 in Leon: The Professional as an orphaned 12-year-old who becomes an assassin, but it seems to me that she’s been coasting directionless pretty much ever since then, into romantic comedies where she showed promise and stuffy dramas where she’s clearly out of place, and let’s not even get into the disastrous Star Wars prequels. She has always hinted at having greater range but rarely seems to show it, with Closer (2004) being one of the only times I can recall such a departure. And so I felt again for the first third of Black Swan, but she brought a real passion to the transformation in the second half of this film and while she might not be my first pick during awards season, I can understand the sentiment as the Oscar buzz picks up. We’ll see what the competition turns out to be. She’s still got a lot of acting years ahead of her, and I’d say that she still has some dues to pay. But then again, hasn’t she already exceeded the capabilities of 2005 Best Actress winner Reese Witherspoon?
As for Darren Aronofsky, he made a lot of non-fans with Requiem for a Dream in 2000, and The Fountain (2006) was not exactly a comprehensible follow-up, but he made his concession to the Hollywood machine a couple of years ago with Mickey Rourke’s comeback in The Wrestler, and he’s spent that Hollywood capital putting together a passionate story he’s been pursuing for a number of years. I’d like to see him get his due recognition for fearless filmmaking and Black Swan is a great example of that, but in this Oscar year with big entries from David Fincher (The Social Network) and Christopher Nolan (Inception), he probably doesn’t stand a chance, with his bold effort not quite a masterpiece.
Impressive growth by two promising artists.
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