Move Over Queen Amidala, There's a New Swan in Town

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2011)

Film provocateur Darren Aronofsky takes the theme of artistic obsession and perfection to breathtaking extremes in "Black Swan," his latest movie freak out.
Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, an accomplished but cold ballerina, whose obsession with control and perfection in her dancing jeopardizes her chances at landing the role of a dancer's lifetime, the Swan Queen in "Swan Lake." After she convinces the show's director (Vincent Cassel) that she can be sexual and dangerous, she gets the part of both the white and black swan, usually danced by two different people, and thus begins her nightmarish journey to lose herself enough to convincingly play the black swan. Lose herself she does, but not just artistically. "Black Swan" is one long sustained note of mental frenzy as Nina cracks.
The formal structure of "Black Swan" mirrors Nina's mental state. The film builds up to moments of outrageous camp, but always backs off just before it allows itself to go completely over the top. I spent most of the film wishing that it would push further, until I realized that the movie was building to one of the most memorable climaxes I can recall, when Nina finally makes her full transformation into the black swan. As horrifying as these final scenes are, they're also thrilling, and the film sent me out on a high.
Natalie Portman is perfect casting as a high-strung, fragile ballerina, and for most of the movie she's not asked to do much more than cry and whimper. But those last scenes, when she so effectively convinces both audiences -- the one in the film and the one watching it -- that she's got what it takes to be dangerous, put the rest of her performance in perspective and make the whole thing more impressive than it might be at first glance. She's given a lot of terrific support by Cassel, Mila Kunis as a fellow ballerina who may or may not be a rival to Nina, and especially Barbara Hershey, as Nina's stage mom from ballerina hell. Also making a couple of brief appearances as a washed up dancer is Winona Ryder, who finds some new and unsettling uses for a letter opener.
"Black Swan" suggests something I've suspected for quite a while -- that frequently an artist's best work is created when he is least sane.
Grade: A