Portman Rises Above an Intensely Kinetic Psychological Thriller That Challenges Coherence

Rating: 6/10 (2 April 2011)

It has taken me a while to see Darren Aronofsky's acclaimed 2010 psychological thriller probably because the marketing campaign at the time of its December release focused more on the film's sensationalistic, horror-film elements. In the meantime, Natalie Portman collected a truckload of awards for her searing portrayal of Nina Sayers, a talented ballerina whose mental state declines as pressure mounts around her starring performance in a new staging of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" by a prestigious New York City ballet company. She is quite good, although I am less relatively enamored by the film itself, especially toward the end, which beyond recalling Aronofsky's earlier work, 2000's "Requiem for a Dream", comes across as an intensely kinetic albeit derivative hybrid of "The Red Shoes", "Carrie", and "Single White Female".
Co-written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin, the screenplay melds Nina's reality, dreams, and hallucinations into quite a ripe melodrama. Nina has long dreamed about playing the lead in "Swan Lake", and her fantasy comes true in a moment of pure bliss before her descent into madness. The ballet troupe's manipulative director Thomas Leroy picks Nina to replace aging prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre to play the Swan Queen, which is two roles in one – Odette, the virginal White Swan awaiting a kiss from the Prince, and her heartless twin, Odile, the sexually predatory Black Swan who lures the prince away. Leroy knows Nina is fully capable of playing the former but remains unconvinced she could exude the sensuality needed to play the latter. While she has trained her whole life for this opportunity, she remains an insecure, emotionally bruised woman still living with her overbearing mother Erica, a former ballerina who never reached the rarefied heights her daughter is about to enter.
Complicating matters is Lily, a new arrival to the company from San Francisco and as liberated a free spirit as Nina is sexually repressed. Meanwhile, as Nina performs to the demands of the role, she crumbles in hidden ways that have her start imagining herself transforming into a swan. Present in almost every frame of the film, Portman is terrific conveying Nina's tentative nature in a way that makes her dedicated training all the more haunting for the sacrifices she makes to achieve her goal of artistic perfection. Within the confines of his predictable role, Vincent Cassel is malevolent enough as the autocratic Leroy, and Barbara Hershey really excels in her few scenes as Erica, showing why Nina's self-esteem has become practically nil. With her haughty manner and skeletal frame, Winona Ryder has more of an extended cameo as Beth, but she makes her fatalistic sense palpable. As Lily, Mila Kunis is almost effortless as Nina's saucy, distrustful competitor.
Compounded by Matthew Labatique's constantly moving camera, Aronofsky's florid direction works on an almost surreal level for about the first three-quarters of the film's 108-minute running time, but his lurid horror-film approach gets excessive toward the end when Nina's confusion between reality and fantasy signals an inability to deal with the life she thought she wanted. The 2011 DVD/BluRay offers an extensive, 49-minute making-of documentary, "Black Swan Metamorphosis" which includes on-set footage and interviews with cast and crew. In addition, there are short featurettes focusing on the ballet sequences, the production design, the costumes, Portman's preparation for the role and Aronofsky's creative process. There are also interviews of the principals from Fox Movie Channel Presents, as well as the theatrical trailer.