Technical virtuosity, big ideas left unexplored. Good music though.

Rating: 6/10 (19 December 2010)

I came into the theater ready to be impressed as all the reviews say I should be, but I left feeling like I had seen a movie that was more formulaic and manipulative than artistic. The commitment of Natalie Portman to her character was extremely impressive, but in the end I do not feel that the screenplay creates much space for her character, or any of the characters, to be moving. As I watched vulnerable Nina descend into madness, I thought how the screenplay could have been so much more interesting if it gave the audience a sense of Nina as someone who is initially strong, who then makes the conscious decision to risk her sanity for her art. We don't see that moment. Furthermore, the manner in which The Black Swan begins to emerge in Nina's life makes the concept of The Black Swan disconnected from The White Swan. How much more interesting it would have been to observe scenes where the two clearly overlapped, rather than existing in separate frames of consciousness within Nina's mind. When I realized at the end that the objective "reality" (a touchy word for any filmmaker to depend upon, but it still has its advantages)of what was going on would not be explained to the audience, since at that point we the audience were supposed to be on some higher level of subjective artistic experience with Nina, I felt cheated. That the pursuit of greatness in art can produce madness is no new idea. Violent passions have existed in ballet and classical music for a long time- that should really not count as a new artistic insight that the movie brings to the audience. Too much time and money were spent on mirror tricks and digital effects. Some more imagination with showing where The Black Swan exists in artists' lives would have been better than personifying it then oversimplifying it into a sort of Sapphic intrigue. Finally, the initial act that makes the director think that Nina has The Black Swan within her- when she bites his lip out of a sort of self-defense- is illogical. The Black Swan here is supposed to be sexually dominant, and commanding. Nina bit his lip because there were few other ways she could fight back a domineering ballet director. And yet this is the moment when he is supposed to sense her supernatural sensual depths? I appreciated the solid performances and the technical virtuosity of this film, but I think there are scarier ways to represent The Black Swan in artists' lives than with goosebumps and tricky camera shots.