Black Swan
Written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin (story by Andres Heinz)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, and Winona Ryder
Warning: this review does contain some spoilers. There are surprises and twists in the movie, and if you’d rather not know them going on, bookmark this page, and then read it after you see the film.
Pitched as drama or a thriller, Black Swan has enough darkly fantastical and horrific elements to qualify as one of our genre films.
In it, Natalie Portman really does deliver an Oscar-worthy performance. She plays Nina Sayer, a cocooned New York City ballerina, dancing in the company, but dreaming of the lead role. She gets her break when the company’s prima ballerina (Winona Ryder) is forced into retirement. But this is where Nina’s growing insanity sends her into the darkness of her own mind.
Nina’s overbearing mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) was on her own way to being a ballet star when she got pregnant and gave up her own career to bear and raise Nina, and now she pinned all her hopes for dancing success on Nina’s career. She cares for Nina, protects Nina, and keeps Nina an emotional child.
Then Nina gets her big break. She’s tapped to audition for the lead role in Swan Lake. And while she can dance the role of the White Swan to perfection (after all, she’s spent her entire career training for perfection), she has difficulty with the dark twin, the Black Swan. For that role, director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) tells her, she has to lose herself, be less perfect and more self assured. She has to be not the good little girl, but the dark and sultry temptress. And her entire life has trained her to be anything but. She struggles.
And then Lily (Mila Kunis) arrives from California. Lily is everything Nina needs to be to play the Black Swan to perfection: self-assured, multi-faceted, and less-than-perfect. She’s also fun-loving, open, and friendly, and immediately tries to befriend Nina. Nina, unfortunately, is descending farther into her own madness, and by turns accepts Lily’s friendship and distrusts it.
Then there’s Nina’s own body. She’s constantly covering up that rash on her back, but it isn’t really a rash. It’s the result of her incessant, unconscious scratching. Erica is the loving, overbearing mother. Heck, she’s Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. She protects Nina, provides everything Nina needs… and can be the cruelest bitch around.
Thomas knows there’s something more inside Nina, some part of herself she might be able to reach, to perform the role to perfection and cement her place in the pantheon of ballerinas, but Nina is too repressed to try. Is he trying to seduce her, to get her into his bed? Or is he simply using the moves of the seducer to help her unlock that hidden place? To help her to let herself go? Increasingly, Nina can’t tell, as her delusions and reality mesh together more and more closely. At some points, they merge so well that even the audience is unsure which is real and which is illusion. But that’s just fine, because that’s the story here. Not only are we watching Nina’s attempt to star in Swan Lake on the stage, but the entire movie is an allegory of the ballet. (It’s made most clear in the closing credits, when each character is also given the name of their role in the grand play.)
The special effects are used sparingly, but to dazzling effect. And there are some bloody, very uncomfortable scenes. But they work together to give us a stunning movie.
After seeing and thinking about the movie, I looked up the story line of the real Swan Lake, and realized the filmmakers had taken some very large liberties with the story line. But as someone watching the movie without an encyclopedic knowledge of ballet, it worked.
This is a brilliant, dark, uncomfortable movie, people with believable characters doing wonderful things. Recommended.