[Major spoilers for Black Swan are not stated outright but can be inferred from what follows]
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Darren Aronofsky seems intent on becoming on of the of the strangest and most unpredictable filmmakers working today. Looking back on it now, Pi, his 1998 debut, seems like an interesting slog, and one that could have easily generated mild heat before Aronofsky slipped away into ambitionless small movies, or was grinded up once he tried to cash in. Instead, he moved onto the Hubert Selby, Jr. adaptation Requiem for a Dream which, despite occasionally betraying an influence from the not-beloved-by-the-mainstream Jan Svankmajer, kept Aronofsky's light burning. A good film, at least part of Requiem's ability to breakthrough came from certain shocking and grotesquely explicit moments, some involving Jennifer Connelly. But Aronofsky also crafted a role for Ellen Burstyn, as a woman addicted to diet pills, that garnered some of that awards buzz that they got. This is something Aranofsky and his actors have been able to do repeatedly, though before then his career was almost fatally derailed by his third film, 2006's The Fountain, a strange philosophical science fiction fantasy about illness, death, grief and the afterlife. Despite boasting a major star (giving an outstanding performance) in Hugh Jackman, The Fountain was badly, and weirdly, underrated by critics whose support The Fountain desperately needed in order to not disappear, which it ultimately did. So six years between Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, and nobody seemed to welcome Aronofsky's return. Aronofsky was attached to a number of potentially interesting genre/geek material, such as adaptations of the comics Batman: Year One and Lone Wolf and Cub, which ultimately came to nothing. Now what?
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Now what is that Aronofsky did what a lot of directors who've struggled as he has end up doing, which is to at least momentarily retreat from screenwriting (he'd written all of his first three films) and accept the possibility that he could make his way as a director for hire, finding appealing scripts and putting his own stamp on the resulting films (there's probably a word for this kind of director, but I don't feel like looking it up). The first film to come of this was The Wrestler from 2008, an excellent film written by Robert D. Siegel that also counted as a jaw-dropping comeback for Mickey Rourke. That awards buzz came around again, and Aronofsky suddenly had a career again. Continuing his directing-for-hire ways, Aronofsky's new film Black Swan resembles nothing so much as the kind of latter-day work we might see from another hard-to-pin-down filmmaker who long ago also retreated from writing his own films, David Cronenberg.
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So Black Swan resembles something by Cronenberg, and, you know, also The Wrestler. It's pretty rare that the kind of X-movie-meets-X-movie formulation to describe a third film is so on-the-nose as it is when describing Black Swan as The Fly meets The Wrestler. But that sure is what it is. The story of a withdrawn, repressed, deeply neurotic and possibly psychotic ballerina named Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), Black Swan is structured, imagined and occasionally shot as a batshit horror film as it chronicles Nina's desperate but nervous attempts to us her rigorous technical ballet skills to persuade ballet company director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) to cast her in his "stripped down" and "raw" staging of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The kicker is, Thomas wants one dancer to play not only the tragic White Swan, but the evil and seductive Black Swan, as well. Working against contemporary ethics, Thomas uses sexual aggression to eke out the kind of fire from Nina (when he tries to kiss her, she bites him) he needs to convince himself that she is something other than an empty technician, and gives her the part. However, Nina, even before she's cast, begins seeing and experiencing strange things, such as women who appear to be her walking past on the subway, and mysterious, bleeding rashes on her shoulder blades. These can be experienced anywhere, including in her own apartment, which she shares with her mother, a severe-looking, but warm -- and very good -- Barbara Hershey.
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Needless to say, these images and rashes increase in bugfuckery as the film progresses, and as the story takes dark and paranoid turns revolving around Winona Ryder's raging, drunk, and past-her-prime former ingenue, and Mila Kunis's hauntingly beautiful newcomer to the company, who may or may not rather have the lead in Swan Lake for her very own. All of this had me pretty much in hog heaven, because as a whole Black Swan hits on a variety of things, seemingly disparate things, that I enjoy and find interesting and mash them all up together.
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Oh my goodness, how did that get in there. But so anyway, among those mashed up things are stories of backstage drama -- a genre that fascinates and entertains me to a degree I'm at a loss to explain -- and horror (which around here is ground well covered). Combining these kinds of stories is something of a masterstroke by screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, and Aronofsky approaches it with all the pulp verve of a guy making a solid little modern B-horror picture that the suits hope will double its meager budget come October. But Aronofsky also brings his detail-oriented eye from The Wrestler over to Black Swan, so that we get a number of shots, and brief digressions, that deal with Nina digging at the soles of her ballet slippers to give them better grip, or having her strained sternum muscles being worked on by the company medic. The pain and physical toll of ballet, as of wrestling in The Wrestler, is always present in Black Swan, as it must be to drive home not only Nina's drive, but what she's driving to do.
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In short, Black Swan is a curious mix. It also manages to be a bit schematic in its final third, when not only the horror elements break into the foreground, but the parallels with The Wrestler become more than just stylistic in nature. There's a moment near the end, a shot, that I felt certain was the end, but I soon realized it wasn't, and my heart started to sink. The film, I felt, was pulling away from everything -- pulling away from certain story elements is part of what movies like Black Swan do, but pulling back too far can bring the whole mess down. Before going further, I should point out that I didn't feel that the source of the film's horror elements were all that difficult to guess (an early trailer for Black Swan cheated by adding a line that deepened the mystery, but that line is not in the film, and, in fact, could not have been in the film, given where it goes, so the trailer, which got a lot of people quite excited for the film, was constructed at least in part in bad faith), and so certain revelations operated on a level, and not a bad level, different from what Aronofsky and company had planned. But still, how far can you go before it all stops working, and becomes a hollow shell, empty of any of the significance you'd tried to build up?
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In the case of Black Swan, I'm not sure of the answer. Because while the film goes on for about another ten minutes past the point I thought and hoped would be the end, my uncertainty about the wisdom of this choice is pretty sharply offset by what Natalie Portman does in those ten minutes (and the previous ten minutes, and the 80 minutes prior to that). If there is one thing that is, for me, unambiguously great about Black Swan it is her performance, though when I think of her greatness here I have to focus on that final stretch, when Portman has to show Nina -- a nervous, insecure, unhappy person -- "bringing it together", mentally, silently, for two different reasons and in two slightly different contexts, and pulling it off in ways that are both chilling and skin-crawling, not to mention, from a perspective removed from the madness of what Black Swan has become, heart-breaking. Black Swan is, I think, a very good movie. Natalie Portman, meanwhile, is a goddamn revelation. To say I didn't think she had this in her is an understatement (and definitive proof, if any was needed, that George Lucas can't direct actors for shit) -- I do not mean to exaggerate when I say that I'm having a hard time thinking of a performance this year that so blind-sided me, apart from Edgar Ramirez in Carlos.
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All these words and I've never even mentioned the sex! Well, it's there, and it's as advertised, and it's not by any means an insignificant aspect of the film. In other words, it's not just there to be there, those scenes having both dark and terribly awkward stings in their tales to underline Nina's status as a grown-up child -- when she gets angry and swipes a music box off her nightstand, taking her frustration out on it precisely because it's a reminder of her childishness, there's a porcelain kitten right behind it, in plain view -- a young woman who is being forcibly driven from her shell by a curiously meek brand of ambition, and various seduction attempts by various genders. Plus also other things. But who's to blame for where we end up? Not her mother (this was an easy lay-up I was pleased to see Aronofsky and the screenwriters refuse to take), but certainly any number of other people. First, though, look in the mirror.
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