As constrained and striving and talented as the leading character

Rating: 7/10 (18 January 2011)

Black Swan (2010)
There are some thrills and some beautiful elements to any movie about the ballet, and to any Darren Aronovsky film, so "Black Swan" is wired for success. Add hardworking veteran Natalie Portman to the mix, and in a nutshell you have the movie.
"Black Swan" has all the feelings of a bold, epic opera, a melodrama with psychological arrows, and fairy tale about being a girl and wanting to make it as the swan, as the ballerina. Us guys can get that, too, even if we don't pirouette so well.
Sadly, if not unexpectedly (I've never seen real depth to Aronovsky's universe), there is a constant exchange of sensation for penetration. The writers almost willfully give us plot devices we've seen before. The idea of a person (Portman's Nina the ballerina) who is too uptight to be successful and just has to be less perfect to be more perfect is an appealing but well worn idea. The characters are mostly cardboard clichés, like the bitter and controlling mother and the womanizing and aesthetically superior super-male director, neither of whom we really get to know.
Come to think of it, we don't really learn anything about the character of our leading female. Nina is a richly played stereotype. I don't mean she doesn't have a range of emotions, and certainly Portman makes the most of the emotional and physical pain in her memorable performance. The one force-fed diversion from the straight and narrow world of New York Ballet is when Nina steps out and goes nightclubbing, and her disorientation in that world only reminds us of what she is not. But surely her young adult life has had some shaping influences, some quirks of real personality, something besides the apparent trap of being a little girl forever.
And then, in what did surprise me for Aronovsky, the filming itself is awkward. The camera-work was really nice, strictly speaking--lots of moving camera, lots of anxiety in the unsteady image. But the light, the lighting, is painfully unexplored, unexploited. Once I noticed this, I couldn't help see how many of the scenes were filmed with a deliberately plain, almost "ordinary" light. Many movies are of course enhanced by being real world and even "badly" lit, the characters falling into shadow, the color of the light unappealing. But this is not story about the ordinary. Some of the scenes are even completely imaginary, and others are on the stage, with theater lights. By the last scene, the great performance, with Tchaikovky's music throbbing in the background, there is some sense of light and drama, and yet, amazingly, it is relatively withheld.
There are many movies that this one draws on, or draws up next to for comparison, from "The Phantom of the Opera" which is truly disturbing to any number of Zeffirelli productions which seem to have the same intention to wow the audience above all else, and do so with amazing visual and sonic excess. "Black Swan" has the intention common to Aranovsky's work to be profound, and this might be the big flaw in his career. That is, I don't think you succeed at trying to be profound. Instead, you succeed at doing something with perception and originality and subtlety, and then you might, as a product (but not a direct goal) discover, or uncover, something that is in fact profound.
So, this movie will make you think a little and it is very enjoyable. I found myself laughing out loud a few times when the effort to impress the audience became ludicrous, but at other times I was engaged and impressed. Go with reasonable expectations.