I have to include spoilers to talk about this movie

Rating: 6/10 (28 December 2010)

Watching the first hour of this movie, I was very much drawn into this story and couldn't wait to see how it resolved. Natalie Portman was fun to watch as a delicate young girl working herself to death to be a perfect ballerina. The conflict came from the director of her company, who pushed her to play a dual role that required her to take on a dark, seductive mindset. We see that her character, Nina, still lives with her mother, who has coddled and protect her, not allowing her to be exposed to aspects of life that would give her any experience at being dark or messy. Then, we meet Lily, Nina's polar opposite: impulsive, liberated, sexual. She is as uninhibited as Nina is controlled. The story teases that Lily will help Nina open up, and starts to move that way. Where I became frustrated was in the second half of the movie. Nina has more and more things happen to her that we think will finally allow her to dance the black swan as her director wants: as a sexual, seductive temptress. But after each event--flirtations from the director, a night on the town with Lily, standing up to her mom--she remains cold and mousy. In the final moments of the nearly two hour film, we finally get the climactic release we deserve, as Nina fully becomes the black swan and goes to a new place through her dance. However, by this point she has descended almost completely into madness, having so many hallucinations and dream sequences, that the audience can't be sure that any of what they have seen has been real.
My opinion of this movie is that I would have enjoyed it more without the mental illness. It didn't really interest me to see Nina go crazy and destroy herself as a result of the pressure to perform. I am not a fan of stories that have characters lose their minds to take the story where it has to go. If it had been written so that she somehow became a victim of her own ambition, I would have found it more interesting. When a movie does what this one did and fills its running time with dream sequences and hallucinations, it feels to me like a cheat. I'm watching things that aren't real in the world of the characters I am trying to place myself in.
Some reviewers have suggested that parts of this movie are open to interpretation, but I think the final scene in which Nina sees the stage lights become a single bright haze must surely mean that she passed on, presumably from self-injury during one of her spells. I compare this to the ending of the horror movie May, which did roughly the same thing, but made more sense to me. The lead character injured herself severely enough to bleed to death, but didn't start hallucinating until she was beginning to fade. It made her characters choices more valid, because she was acting on her own motivations until that point, and not responding to imaginary occurrences.
I did enjoy those final moments when Nina danced the black swan and seemed to really go off the deep end. It was the thrilling climax I had been waiting for, but didn't give me as much satisfaction as I felt it would. As I said, I felt the movie got a little off track--it build up my expectations, and when I thought I was ready for the climax, it kind of deflated my interest a bit, causing me to not be as emotionally invested as I might have had the story been a little tighter. Overall, I thought most aspects of the movie were done very well, and it was certainly an exciting piece of flimmaking, but for me, not the classic it might have been.