3 ½ stars (out of four)
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is being billed as a “psychological thriller.” The term certainly fits the film though it might mislead some to believe that Aronofsky has crafted a genre film. Black Swan is a haunting and often disturbing film, but its thrills come from within the mind. This is a horror film founded on ideas and atmosphere. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a ballet dancer who might be losing her mind. Strange marks are appearing on her body only to disappear a moment later. She’s having hallucinations. Or are they really there? Once reality is questioned, the floor drops out from underneath her and the audience follows her on a quest to understand the unknowable and invisible forces affecting her. Nina dances for a company in New York. Thomas, the company’s director (Vincent Cassel) has promised to feature her more this season and she has an outside chance of being cast in the starring role of Swan Lake after the company's previous star (Winona Ryder) announces her retirement. The part is a double role – the White Swan and the Black Swan. Thomas explains to her that while she’s the best dancer in the company and an easy choice to play the graceful and fragile White Swan, she lacks the Black Swan’s passion and sexuality. He has a reputation, however, for being romantically involved with his dancers and Nina knows how to play her cards. After some ethically questionable casting practices, she lands the part.
Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is delighted by the news. She gave up dancing when she had Nina and has been living vicariously through her daughter’s career. She pampers Nina and we see why Nina finds the Black Swan such a challenge. Her bedroom is filled with her childhood stuffed animals and her mother still tucks her in at night. Between Thomas’s sexual advances and the stress of the role, her sheltered life is slowly crumbling.
Expediting that process is Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer who has just flown in from California. She embodies everything about the Black Swan that Nina doesn’t – she’s flirtatious, passionate, relaxed – and soon has a strange hold over Nina. Why did she suddenly appear now, on the verge of Nina’s newfound success? Whether her arrival is a coincidence or a conspiracy, she becomes to Nina a professional and sexual competitor.
In a way, Black Swan has much in common with Aronofsky’s previous effort, The Wrestler. Both films follow a performer’s struggle to live up to expectations they’ve set for themselves and in both cases their performances are destroying them. Where The Wrestler was marked by a gritty realism, however, Black Swan indulges in surreal fantasy, a testament to Aronofsky’s versatility as a director. He casts a hypnotic atmosphere over the film, drawing the viewer in and maintaining its trance over the audience through the film’s final moments.
In Aronofsky’s hands, a small New York apartment becomes a claustrophobic cell for Nina. Lily briefly draws her out of her shell and takes her to a dance club that, after a few drinks and a pill, becomes a hallucinatory nightmare. This scene, one of the film’s best, is one of several mesmerizing sequences that draw the viewer into Nina’s perspective. We see and experience her distorted reality, unable to distinguish the real from the imagined. How much of what we see is a fantasy? A dream? Delusions? Real life? Would making such distinctions really matter anyways?
With this film and his earlier work, Aronofsky has proved himself to be a skilled stylist, making it easy to forget how much of an actor’s director he is. His past films have featured performances of the highest caliber (Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler) and Black Swan is no exception. Natalie Portman carries the film as Nina, balancing the character’s fearful anxieties with sudden dark turns. She also succeeds in the difficult task of acting while dancing. When Thomas criticizes Nina for being too tense and controlled as the Black Swan, we can see in Portman's face what he is talking about.
Also excellent is Kunis, who has found her breakout role here. She brings to the film much of the charm that marked her performances in lighter fare such as “That 70’s Show” and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and finds use for it in considerably darker material. Her Lily is seductive and cavalier, and makes for a compelling foil to Portman’s Nina. Barbara Hershey is chilling as the controlling mother, and Vincent Cassel brings the right amount of sleaze and menace to his character.
Nina’s surreal experience could be taken as a metaphor for the craft of acting. As her unusual transformation takes hold of her, parallels begin to develop between the play and her life. Aronofsky does not limit the film to this one interpretation, however. He deftly moves back and forth between fantasy and reality so that the viewer is not trapped into a guessing game of what is real and what is not. The only reality is that onscreen and we accept the disturbing power of the film’s imagery.
Black Swan is a relentless film and is so absorbing that one needs a few minutes to readjust after the closing credits roll. Each scene flows into the next to make for a nightmarish whole. There are brief moments of reprieve (the film occasionally has a bizarre sense of humor), but even these maintain the film's grasp on the viewer. Black Swan is indeed a thriller, one that explores the tenuous nature of identity and reveals how fragile the mind’s hold on that identity can be.
- Steve Avigliano, 12/26/10
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