Losing Yourself In The Darkness Of The Part

Rating: 9/10 (9 July 2011)

First off let no one think that if they see Black Swan from 2010 that earned Natalie Portman a Best Actress Oscar that they are looking at a remake of the Tyrone Power swashbuckling classic. Instead this film which has a setting in a ballet company is an interesting combination of plot themes from A Double Life and All About Eve.
Company choreographer Victor Cassel chooses promising newcomer Natalie Portman to be the lead in his new production of Swan Lake to succeed his long time star Winona Ryder who is not taking her forced retirement easy. Portman has been Ryder's Eve Harrington, but Portman also has an Eve in her life as well, the younger and talented Mila Kunis. A lot of fine roles for women in this film.
Portman is no doubt talented, but she's dealing with a lot of issues of paranoia, a lot of it instilled by her mother Barbara Hershey. She starts losing herself in the dark complexities of the Black Swan as surely as Ronald Colman did with Othello in A Double Life. How it all works out for all the women you have to see Black Swan.
And you'll like what you see. It's hard to miss the elements in those classics that I've cited in Black Swan. But if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best. And since an Oscar came Ronald Colman's way and one of her 10 nominations came Bette Davis's way, Natalie Portman sure had a substantial role that she played beautifully.
The real surprise for most viewers I think will be Mila Kunis who played the vapid Jackie on That Seventies Show. Kunis provided one of the great lines from television in that show when she stated that no one would deter her from her career goal to be Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. She should have gotten some Oscar recognition herself for the Eve Harrington type role she plays here.
Black Swan is the best film about ballet since the Anne Bancroft/Shirley MacLane classic The Turning Point from the Seventies. Try to see this one by all means.