Tom Long reviews 'Black Swan': 'Black Swan' starring Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, Sebastian Stan, Vincent Cassel, Janet Montgomery, and Barbara Hershey
There's a delirium that runs through "Black Swan," a sense of stress and anguish and mad momentum, that's both exhilarating and terrifying.
The story is far from unique — in fact the film sometimes seems a convergence of horror film cliches colliding into one another. But director Darren Aronofsky ("The Wrestler," "The Fountain") guides Natalie Portman, a sure Oscar nominee, through a singular performance that serves as a perfect center to his wild storm of music, dance and swirling visuals.
Portman plays Nina Sayers, a brittle, emaciated and obsessed ballerina with a big city ballet who desperately wants to play the dual roles of the white and black swans in a new production of "Swan Lake."
The ballet's pompous director (Vincent Cassell) knows she can easily master the techniques needed to play the white swan, but worries whether she has the true passion and seductive nature to play the evil black swan.
If Nina seems a bit repressed, a lot of it has to do with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), a former ballerina whose career ended when she had Nina. She now lives through Nina, and Nina lives as a ballet nun, working, working, working at improving and reaching for perfection.
She has become a ballet machine, but to play the black swan she will have to reclaim her humanity. Unfortunately, a new dancer arrives, Lily (Mila Kunis), and she moves with both grace and eroticism. To show he is not overly concerned with subtlety, Aronofsky has black wings tattooed on Lily's back.
The pressure is on Nina right from the beginning, and it takes its immediate toll. She dresses mostly in white, but begins seeing her face on women dressed in black. She tries to humanize herself, but her mother has her in such constraints that loosening up seems impossible.
A rash begins growing on Nina's back, and then something seems to be growing back there. Could that be… a black feather?
Aronofsky has a number of movies going on at once here. There's the ballet competition movie, the mad mother movie, the losing-my-mind movie and the Svengali movie, not to mention an entirely other storyline about a suicidal, aging ballerina (Winona Ryder).
But if you've seen it all before, you haven't seen it done like this, from the Cronenberg and Lynch directorial flourishes — fingers and toes become constant objects of terror here — to the final scenes that crescendo atop one another as Nina actually performs "Swan Lake" in a swirl of insanity and brilliance.
It's hard to make out what Aronofsky is saying here, but he's saying it in a spectacularly deranged way that brings dance, violence, sex and fragility together to make … Art? Craziness? Beauty?
It doesn't matter; it works. And it works in great part thanks to Portman, who has never shown anything like this sort of commitment to a character. She manages to make the inhuman Nina very human indeed, a dancing tragedy, grace with gravitas. She is indeed perfect.
"Black Swan" isn't for everyone — it is a ballet horror movie, after all. But there's an ecstatic tension here that's undeniable and beyond words. Catch the craziness.
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Natalie Poetman’s Nina gets more in touch with her dark side with a recklessness that threatens to destroy her. / Fox Searchlight Pictures
Natalie Portman is a sure Oscar nominee for her role as ballerina Nina ... (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
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