Black Swan
dir. Darren Aronofsky
2010

"Didn't the emperor specifically forbid the ballet in his opera?"
- Antonio Salieri, Amadeus

"You fuckin' varmint! Dance!"
- Tommy, GoodFellas

"Everybody knows that the bird is the word."
- The Rivingtons, Surfin' Bird


What happens to a person when their life's compulsion becomes self-destruction? That is the question that drives Darren Aronfsky's work. Whether the compulsion is drugs and game shows, professional wrestling, the quest for immortality or just the number 3.14159..., Aronfsky's characters are captured in the moment of crossing personal event horizons. Unable to escape the gravity well of their own obsessive, unfulfillable need, they are consumed.

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, the talented ballerina daughter of a ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) who suffers pain, alienation, indignity and madness in her quest to perform the Swan Queen.

Like Roman Polanski's Repulsion, Black Swan's protagonist suffers from paranoid hallucinations. She admires and resents the elder ballerina in her troupe, whose role she is taking, nearly as much as she fears and suspects her younger understudy, who may be trying to help her loosen up or may be trying to sabotage her career.

But Repulsion was a study of madness and nothing more. There was no pretense of high art in Catherine Deneuve's Carole. She was simply crazy and the film was an exercise in depicting her lunacy in a way that makes the horror of it relatable.

What's missing from Black Swan is so obvious that Aronofsky actually has characters repeatedly say it, whisper it and yell it at a rather stunned-looking Natalie Portman.

"The only thing holding you back is you! Let go! Show me the passion of the character!"

Would that Aronofsky had taken his own advice here. Nina's Black Swan performance is technically flawless but cold and flat, making it a microcosm of the movie itself.

What we lack here is any sense of what ballet means to Nina. We understand that she is dedicated to her career and that she's a product of her overbearing mother who lives vicariously through her young daughter. Technically that motivation is delivered sans flaw.

But it is cold and flat because at no point does Nina tell us what is so important to her about ballet. Maybe the answer is "nothing." Maybe that's the point. Maybe what was missing from her Black Swan was the fact that she was just dancing to please her mother and her director and not to express anything about herself.

All around her, characters are telling her to loosen up, to find herself, to get laid or at least masturbate. She needs a reason to dance that does not involve fear of disappointing someone.

This could have made for interesting storytelling if not for the fact that when we approach that mirror, something goes haywire. Rather than showing us a character finding her inner passion, her personal need to be the Black Swan, we're treated to a series of cheap thrills and jumpy shock shots that don't mean anything because we're pretty well aware by that point that Nina is off her rocker.

So ultimately, her quest for perfection comes off flat. It's perfection for perfection's sake, not perfection in something.

Watching Black Swan is like taking a two hour drive to help someone complete an errand that isn't even theirs to begin with. Though you may enjoy the scenery, the trip is all too forgettable.

Two stars. Jason says, tough guys don't dance.