Cringe-worthy and intense... and little else

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2011)

This movie was hard to watch.
That, in and of itself, doesn't make it bad. However, the fact a movie makes you look away in disgust every few minutes doesn't make it interesting, and that's about all I found myself doing for two hours.
Even if you accept The Black Swan as a horror movie, which is about all I can understand it as, I thought the most cringe-worthy, intense moments were the (too frequent) close ups of bloody chunks of Natalie Portman's body falling off. This made the screen-filling shots of Portman finding new ways to simultaneously flex her neck muscles and tear glands lose power and relevance since the audience has already been numbed by all the gore... which renders beside-the-point her much hyped performance. (If all the movie does is make your stomach churn, and most of this is accomplished by the gross factor and not by method acting, what else are you left with?) To further the cheapening of the movie, the CGI goose bumps (swan bumps, to be more accurate) are pretty much totally unnecessary, though I guess they're almost (ALMOST) funny.
About the only good thing (which still wasn't particularly rewarding to watch) was the intense relationship between Nina (Portman) and her mother.
In short, everything about this movie is over the top. Perhaps this can be justified if you argue that the whole film is a sort of "performance" of Swan Lake, complete with costumes and exaggerated characters. This might explain unrealistic features like the presence of "imprecise" dancers with huge tattoos on their backs in important positions at a major metropolitan dance company. (I don't know anything about ballet, but "imprecise" and "career" seem like mutually exclusive concepts in a world I understand to be about as competitive as formula 1 auto racing... or becoming an astronaut.) But even if clichéd rebel dancers and virginal, pretty ones are "characters" in a "performance," it doesn't make them interesting, and doesn't really justify their flatness.
All in all, this film succeeds in making viewers feel uncomfortable.
However, I found myself feeling little more than that.
While I would actually have given the movie two or three stars out of 10, I gave it just one to compensate for all the gushing 10/10 reviews.