Sunday, December 19, 2010

Sweet Girl

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[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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20 comments:

Tony Dayoub said...

So great is this movie, that I'm frankly in shock when I hear anyone didn't like it. Like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, A SERIOUS MAN and THE SOCIAL NETWORK, BLACK SWAN has (rightly or wrongly) become sort of a litmus test for me in terms of how I measure other critics.

bill r. said...

Oh thank God I passed!!!

It goes without saying that I liked the film a lot, but I certainly wouldn't rank it up with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS or A SERIOUS MAN. THE SOCIAL NETWORK, though, I think that's more the level I view BLACK SWAN: I think both have some pretty obvious faults, but are nevertheless excellent films that I will probably watch over and over again in the years to come.

Tony Dayoub said...

Oh yeah, I'm not ranking them equally. I meant you either get them or you don't. And while I wish it weren't that way, I can't help but judge someone (cinephile at least) in relation to their take on these divisive films.

Josh said...

Nice review, Bill. I liked it a little more than you did, I think.

But that mom is not warm. Also, I think you spelled the director's name wrong.

What was the line from the trailer anyway? I don't usually pay that much attention to them before I see the film. I don't know if I saw that one.

bill r. said...

Tony - Everybody does that. It'll pass when you find a critic who didn't like BLACK SWAN being the only other one to agree with you on some other movie.

Josh - She is warm. I mean, she ain't cold. She's not a perfect mother, but she loves her daughter, supports her, doesn't want her to push herself too hard, wants he to watch out for Thomas, etc. She's a better mother than Nina is a daughter. She's warm.

And the line was someone other than Nina asking "Are those feathers!?"

Ed Howard said...

And the line was someone other than Nina asking "Are those feathers!?"

Hah, really? It's bad enough the trailers make it look like a thriller where Lily is stalking and threatening Nina. The trailers are so misleading, which is pretty common, but they seem especially egregious for this film.

Anyway, great piece, Bill. It sounds like you're somewhat disappointed that the film provides a definitive explanation of sorts for the horror elements at the end - unless I'm misreading you - but it seems to me like it was pretty obvious all along that much of what Nina was experiencing was either happening only in her mind or was colored by her mind. The film is destabilizing in the sense that it keeps shifting from one hallucination to the next, always calling into question what's real, but the result is not that it makes it seem like Nina is literally transforming into a swan, but that it makes it seem like everything in the film is potentially unreal. I loved it, too, it's such a wild trip.

bill r. said...

Thanks, Ed. I agree, it's pretty obvious what the source of this wild imagery is, and I was fine with that. What disappointed me -- only mildly, in the end -- is how far it pulled back from what Nina was actually doing. The truth behind the dressing room confrontation, for example, I thought was pulling too far back from the craziness. Even so, Portman's acting of those scenes was extraordinary, so I can only complain so much.

On that note, though, Winona Ryder in the hospital -- something happened there, didn't it? Or didn't it? She had the knife in the elevator, which, if also not real, makes that whole bit a double reverse, but I can just about buy that Nina did something in that hospital room that simply hadn't come back to bite her by the time the film ended.

Ed Howard said...

The Winona Ryder scene has been nagging at me too, mostly in a good way. It's one unanswered question in the film: how much of that was real? Did Nina really stab her? I would have to say probably, since the dressing room confrontation, for example, was not entirely a hallucination but did in fact involve someone getting stabbed with a piece of glass. So it seems likely that if Nina imagined Beth getting stabbed with the nail file, she probably did get stabbed.

bill r. said...

That's my take, too. I can't imagine Aronofsky would include that shot of Nina in the elevator if he intended us to believe nothing had happened at all.

Josh said...

I'm not a screenwriter, but I can't think of a reasonable way to tie up that loose end of what actually happened in the hospital.

I disagree strongly about Mommy Dearest. I won't go so far as to say she doesn't love Nina in some way, but she's extremely passive-aggressive (as with the cake scene--just what every prima ballerina wants!) and controlling. She appears to alternate between wanting Nina to succeed for her own vicarious pleasure, and deeply resenting Nina's success. She may love her daughter, but she also hates her. And Nina knows that her mother is unfairly blaming her for having to give up a dance career that was essentially going nowhere anyway. One of the things that I appreciate about the movie is that you have a sense that the underlying conflict has been going on for decades. So I don't see Nina as being a bad daughter, so much as I see her finally acting out after years of quietly taking mom's abuse.

bill r. said...

Well, I don't see that at all. Not that she's perfect -- I'll give you the cake scene -- but at one point the mother says something about Nina "scratching herself again", which implies that she has had to deal with some level of her daughter's mental problems in the past, and as a result wants and needs to keep an eye on her to make sure things don't spiral out of control. Of course, she has no idea how bad things have gotten, but she's trying, in her own feeble way, to help Nina. I mean, she doesn't want her daughter going out, which at first seems like an unreasonably controlling move, but Nina DOES go out, and look where that gets her.

Tony Dayoub said...

I think Josh is right on this one. Nina acts out IN RESPONSE TO Mommy's overbearing control. Mommy resents giving up her career to raise Nina. So she has created a Frankenstein's monster in Nina: Mom's ambitions and her desire for Nina to succeed all sewn up in her neurotic daughter's petite body.

bill r. said...

Okay, but where's the evidence? She tries to get Nina to pull back for her own good, and she's right about that. What evidence do you see of a history of mental abuse on the mother's part? I'll give you the cake scene, as I've said, but you'd have to really stretch your reading of that to cover what you and Josh are claiming.

Robert H. said...

I TRULY do NOT understand the love this P.O.S. has been getting, except for the fact that Aronofsky was involved. Obvious and trite symbolism, camerawork that made one want to slap the DP for not even attempting to get a profile shot, and psychosis done better in other films, and with intentional humor -- BS is so earnest in the mental breakdown of the main character... who, truthfully isn't nearly as interesting as the supporting characters... that it becomes unintentionally funny.

My opinion, of course. If some nobody had done this, it'd gone straight to DVD or cable, where it rightfully belongs.

bill r. said...

Well I liked it.

Tony Dayoub said...

"Okay, but where's the evidence?"

I'm stumped. It's kind of hard to offer evidence in a movie with an unreliable narrator, I must admit. My instinct is the only thing I can offer up, and hopefully that carries some measure of credibility.

Ed Howard said...

I agree with Tony and Josh: the mother is very domineering, and it seems obvious that Nina remains so childlike and repressed in large part because her mother encourages it, because her mother keeps her sheltered. I mean, the mother sees a girl at the door asking for Nina and sends her away, trying to prevent Nina from knowing she's there. And the cake scene, where she throws that bizarre tantrum. More subtly, there's the scene where Nina flubs her audition and then, in the background, you hear the mother calling someone (presumably an old friend of hers from the dance studio) and complaining about how the director expects perfection, how Nina's not as good as Beth but she does try hard. It's all so passive/aggressive and strange. To some extent, you can see the nature of their relationship more in the way Nina reacts to her mother, the way she winces at her phone calls, the way she's so desperate for some privacy and so afraid to simply come right out and say it. The mother cares for Nina, of course, but she also hovers over her and clings to her and seems to simultaneously want Nina to succeed while not wanting her to be more successful than she (the mother) was in her own career.

Of course, considering how much the film is filtered through Nina's subjectivity, it's possible that all these signs are also exaggerated by Nina, and that the mother is actually very sweet. But in the film she's definitely something of a villain.

bill r. said...

Tony - Sure it does, but I got my own credibility to think about!

Ed - When she tries to stop her from going out, it's because she knows what's coming. Not to the extent of what actually happens, but she's lived with Nina for 20-some years. As I've said, that's why she's always hovering: because Nina is "scratching herself again".

Plus, really...the idea that what eventually happens -- Nina believes she's turning into an evil black swan and stabs Winona Ryder in the face and thinks she stabs Mila Kunis but actually stabs herself and dies onstage -- all because her mom is passive aggressive is really hard to swallow.

Greg said...

I still haven't seen it so I'll just "hi" to everybody.

And a Hap, Hap, Happy Birthday to Bill.

bill r. said...

Er...spoiler alert? And thanks, Greg!

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