Review Black Swan

Ahhhhhh Darren Aronofsky. He seems to really enjoy movies that are heralded as being higher art (in some ways they are I suppose), but are really known for just being super depressing. The kind of films where when you finish watching, you can only sit there and wallow in the utter depression he's created...people having their entire lives ruined by drugs, a man haunted by the fact that he couldn't find a cure for cancer in time to save his dying wife. You know, real sunshiny stuff.

Still, his films are usually worth seeing once, as he can employ a pretty good visual style and you often see good performances. His latest is Black Swan, a melodramatic thriller that explores the light and dark sides in a fragile ballerina played by Natalie Portman.

Portman plays Nina Sayers, a young ballerina who has been dancing in a heralded New York company for some years, waiting to have her turn in the spotlight. She lives with her mother, a former ballerina who wants more than anything in the world to see her daughter succeed. Nina really only wants one thing in life-to be perfect. She works hard and ballet is her life-but she's also very fragile and shy.

It's the beginning of the new season, and the first show is scheduled to be Swan Lake, the tale of a beautiful woman who is turned into a white swan and nearly has the spell broken by true love, until she is betrayed by her evil twin, the black swan. The company's director (Vincent Cassel) decides to put the show on with a twist-one dancer will play both swans.

It's the chance of a lifetime for Nina, and her moment finally arrives when she is cast as the lead in the production. She's absolutely thrilled to finally have her moment in the spotlight, but she has a lot to deal with. The company's former star, Beth (Winona Ryder), is in a sense forced out because of her age, creating an intense jealousy against the young Nina. A new dancer (Mila Kunis) seems to be gunning for Nina's part, and for the attention of the director. And the director himself is unhappy with Nina's performance of the Black Swan, telling her she needs to get in touch with her other side, the one that is relaxed and passionate, and maybe even a little darker.

This pressure begins to really get to Nina, and she starts having haunting hallucinations of doppelgangers, disturbing injuries, and even swan-like qualities. As she descends further into paranoia, those around her can't help but wonder if she will be able to make the performance of a lifetime.

Paranoia sets in...

The set up for the film is promising, especially for a taut atmospheric thriller that questions the protagonists sanity. Unfortunately, Arronfosky can't decide what the film is-is it a melodrama? A thriller? He tries to mix both, but the result becomes rather muddled. There are moments that are legitimately tense and frightening (such as the moment in the image above), but there also all cheap scares you'd expect in a bad horror movie, like Nina being grabbed violently by someone she thought was asleep. Portman helps the overall quality of the film with a fantastic performance as a young girl who wants to be an angel but begins to turn into a devil, and the rest of the film is equally well cast.

Bottom Line: Black Swan starts off in a promising manner, but turns murky when it can't decide what kind of film it wants to be. It also suffers from a predictable story, cheap scares in parts, and themes are shoved down the viewer's throat (e.g. the use of mirrors to show duplicity). Still, Portman's performance makes the film tolerable overall and worth seeing.

Grade: B-