Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky has directed five films, Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and now Black Swan. In the first two films, Aronofsky established his brand specializing in disturbing visuals of what was happening in the heads of crazy, drugged-out, unhappy people. Then came The Fountain which is a weird multi-dimensional, multi-time-period epic. Two years ago, he made The Wrestler which broke the mold. It was a nice little movie with strong characters and a compelling story that got a couple of Oscar nominations. With the exception of The Wrestler, I find Aronofsky movies interesting from the point of view of film techniques, but not so interesting as movies. Which brings us to his latest film, Black Swan, which takes Aronofsky back to his roots presenting disturbing visuals of what is happening in the heads of crazy, unhappy people, in particular, Natalie Portman.

In Black Swan, Portman portrays a ballerina, long lost in the obscurity of the corps de ballet, who gets her big chance to star in Swan Lake. She is picked by the director (Vincent Cassel) to replace the aging star of the ballet troupe (Winona Ryder). That's right! You heard me. There has been another Winona Ryder sighting! Anyway, Portman's character is a bit stressed out, not just by her debut on the big stage, but also by the director's emotional abuse, her stage-mother mother (Barbara Hershey), and her competitor for the part (Mila Kunis). Oh and she is anorexic too.

Anyway, this all a bit too much for Portman, who then becomes the stereotypical Aronofsky character who loses it, and starts to experience delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, and you name it. In a mirroring of the ballet itself, Portman begins to see herself undergoing a metamorphosis from the good swan to the evil one. The problem with the Aronofsky brand, seen in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and Black Swan, is that all his energy seems to go into the visual effects and not into the story and characters.

None of the characters in Black Swan are at all three dimensional, and some, like Barbara Hershey as Portman's mother, and Vincent Cassel as the director, are barely one-dimensional. Mila Kunis does the best job with her character as Portman's would be friend and competitor. I haven't seen Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) before, but she manages to put some nice complexity into her character. It's nice to see Winona Ryder who is trying to make a bit of a comeback with character parts after so many years in the wilderness. She was also seen in Star Trek last year.

Portman struggles mightily to do something in Black Swan but is defeated by the banality of her character. But the blame has to rest with Aronofsky, who after discovering the importance of character and story in The Wrestler, has completely forgotten it again in Black Swan. This movie is a terrible waste of a nice cast and also of an interesting plot idea. I say "idea" because that is all that it is, and it doesn't get developed beyond a stressed out ballerina who doesn't eat enough and starts to hallucinate. I was excited to see this movie but then very disappointed that the old Aronofsky is back. There are lots of better Christmas movies out there. Go see them.