Black Swan

Released: 2010
Drama, Mystery
Director: Darren Aronofsky (He did The Wrestler [fantastic movie])
Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey
Running Time: 108 minutes
Rated: R (as it should be)

The breakdown: The downward spiral of a ballet dancer who's so obsessed with perfecting her craft she loses her mind.


Portman plays Nina, a girl who still lives at home, and loves ballet.  In fact, she loves ballet so much she's completely obsessed with it and it rules her life.  She wants the lead in "Swan Lake" desperately and gets it after the original lead dancer becomes too "old" to dance anymore and is fired from the company, played by Winona Ryder.  Ryder in fact, is not really too old, but has most likely lost the affections of the director of the ballet company, and may also have a body that is plagued with problems from dancing so long.  With "Swan Lake" there will be 2 dancing roles for one lead ballerina.  The White Swan - angelic, beautiful, controlled, virginal, and the Black Swan - sexual, free, and dangerous.  So Nina is perfect for the white swan part, but the black swan part is not her strong suit.  I've never seen "Swan Lake", but for this movie the story of the ballet goes like this (and it's explained in the movie that the classics have been reimagined so I'm not sure how different this version is):
A princess is turned into a white swan by a magician's curse, and can only be human again if her prince pledges eternal fidelity to her.  The prince is tricked by the magician, who has crafted his daughter to look exactly like the princess so that the prince will sleep with her and therefore, he will not remain faithful to the true princess.  Well, he sleeps with the magician's daughter and the princess is so distraught that she will remain a swan forever, she commits suicide by jumping off a cliff.  (but.....swans can fly.....so that doesn't really work, but whatever, just play along I guess).

Nina has been a ballet dancer her whole life (at least it appears this way).  Her controlling mother was also a ballet dancer so who knows if Nina even wants to be a dancer, in her heart.  Her mother apparently never made it very far in dance and gave up what career she did have, to give birth to Nina.  She doesn't let Nina forget this point.  Her mother has now turned to painting to feel creative.  (This makes for an interesting, creepy scene later.)  The father is never discussed and isn't in their lives so we are never reminded there was a father.
Anyways, Nina and her mother share a very small New York apartment and it seems her mother lives for pampering and controlling Nina.  It is arguable that Nina has never even been out on a date or had sex, even though the character is supposed to be in her early 20's.

There are a lot of disturbing things going on in this movie, not that this aspect of the movie makes it bad.  For one thing it shows how badly dancers hurt for their craft.  Nina is seen getting her bones cracked and manipulated to ease pain in her joints and continue working.  Her body is a terribly thin frame to be lifted by male dancers and she hardly eats anything.  Her mother is incredibly suffocating and never gives Nina any privacy.  Nina has no apparent friends and certainly no boyfriends (it seems her life and career leaves no time for such distractions.)  And of course, most disturbing of all, a young woman who loses her grip on reality and completely loses her mind.  At different points in the movie she's scratching at her skin intensely and thinking she's growing feathers.

IF this movie had stuck to a non-supernatural feel and went for realism, then it would be a great character study movie.  Fantastic, I would've said.  A girl who is obsessed with dancing, consumes herself with passion and perfection and descends into a terrible state of mind where there is no satisfying her desire to be perfect....genius!  It would've been just as good or better than The Wrestler, this director's other movie.  In fact, he said these two movies started out as one where the wrestler would've fallen in love with the ballet dancer. Anyway,

I did not like this movie as a whole.  I did like parts of it though.  For instance, Natalie Portman did an excellent job playing this role.  I understand why she got the Oscar. 

There's a painting scene that I referenced earlier that's very effective.  My favorite thing about this movie actually, because it's so well done.  But if you blink you might miss it.

I did not like the whole movie precisely because where it ran off the rails was when they started to make it feel supernatural, or paranormal/horror in nature.  This simply ruins the purity of the drama that's already there and succeeding.  They tried to make you believe maybe Nina was schizophrenic, maybe psychotic - ok, that's fine.  The director used a lot of mis-direction and they left a lot unexplained to the point where the audience becomes confused at the end - not ok.  Anytime a movie leaves me feeling confused, or I'm angry because I'm confused -the movie was not successful.  The director fails.

I'm not saying using mis-direction is bad, I'm neutral to the technique.  I'm not saying that mental illness is clean, simple, and easy to understand, but it's in the details of how you show it.  Execution has to be flawless for this plot to work.  There were a lot of missed opportunities to explain some situations where the audience would have a better idea of what was real and what wasn't.  I call it the Ah-ha moment - you know, where everything they've shown you makes sense and you say ah-ha, I see what they were doing there.  I don't think they had to take anything away from the movie, but they needed to add to it for it to come across better.  The director, thus the film, missed the mark for me.  Instead of it coming off brilliant, it came off as unfinished, messy, and feeling like the director couldn't explain some situations he had created so you get that loose end feeling as well.
This movie is convoluted, which might be the whole point.  I get that.  She's mental unravelling.  Of course, she's going to hallucinate, but the lack of clarity for the audience makes the movie fail.  It's a cop out for the director to present a whole bunch of scenes and just say, "Oh let the audience try to figure all this out."

I can only give the film a 2 out of 5 and that's mostly for Portman and the possibility that this could've been so much better had it dropped the supernatural vibe.

PS
I recommend that if you want to see a good movie for madness - The Shining is a great example.  This is a horror movie that shows mental illness because of paranormal powers, but it mixes both together beautifully.  Black Swan meanwhile tries to say it's 95% drama (real life) and 5% scary paranormal stuff but that 5% is enough to ruin the movie.
The Shining is truly scary, truly good drama, truly someone losing his mind as well, just done much much more effectively.