Where has this Natalie Portman been hiding? In the horrendous Star Wars prequels and the other generic rom-coms that I haven’t seen, Portman has never received much applause for her performances; they weren’t bad but nothing special either. But if you would have told me ten years ago that Padmé from Episode I would go from a wooden performance of terrible dialog to a serious contender for Best Actress, I would have laughed at your absurdity.
In Black Swan, Portman plays Nina, a dancer in a prestigous New York dance company who works hard but mostly without notice. After the announcement that the lead ballerina is set to retire, the troup’s director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) sets out to find a lead for his version of Swan Lake. Nina is considered due to her precise dancing ability but Thomas worries about her ability to play the parts of both the pristine White Swan and the devious Black Swan convincingly.
Nina ends up getting the lead role but that leads her to obsess over her technique which Thomas says is too calculating for the role of the Black Swan. When Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company, Nina becomes worried that her counterpart is vying for the role as well. And Nina’s overbearing roommate/manager/mother (Barbara Hershey) worries over her increasingly odd behavior. All of this on the surface is an interesting enough story but director Darren Aronofsky is able to take these elements (which also borrow heavily from the production of focus) and concoct a dark and haunting tale of obsession, the pursuit of perfection and its toll on Nina.
Portman almost certainly is a shoe-in for her career-best performance of the idealistic dancer whose mental state slowly breaks down under the constant pressure from her herself, her director, and her mother. She allegedly spent a year before production polishing her childhood dance skills and lost a fair amount of weight to accurately portray a professional dancer. Seeing her emaciated frame and pale figure transforms the normally beautiful actress into an almost different person altogether. Seeing her slow descent into madness is quite a depressing notion (not unlike some of Aronofsky’s other films) as we see and experience the physical and psychological changes that transpire as Nina strives for perfection.
I am hesitant about filing this under the horror category as even though there are certain components from a standard horror flick, it is not the main focus. Early on there are some unsettling images (especially given the almost constant use of mirrors in the film) but at a certain point around the beginning of the third act, Aronofsky amps up the horror tropes and very effectively I might add. To some, such a shift might seem jarring (as I have read in other reviews of the film) but given that we are with Nina for the entirety of the movie, it perfectly visualizes her deepening distress.
Kunis as Lily shows up early on in the picture and we are mostly left in the dark about her true motivations. Is she trying her best to steal the role by any means necessary or just being a supportive friend for the mostly shut-in and friendless Nina? And for some of the more horrorific parts, we never really get clarification as to what is real and what isn’t. The ambiguity is frustrating but justified being that the story is doggedly focused on Nina which just furthers illustrates her paranoia and further decline.
The fact that Aronofsky is able to create such a compelling story about professional dancers is commendable. Like most those who watch this film I fathom, I am not the target audience for ballet. However, everything from the rigorous, almost torturous, routine, the self-doubt, the backstage shenanigans, and of course the eerie imagery flow together as smoothly as a musical ballad. The film is further helped by Clint Mansell‘s haunting score that is built upon the music from the production. Mansell in addition to scoring Aronofsky’s other films also did the music for Moon.
While the movie is not really that complicated, it is quite complex which makes its standard two hour runtime feel longer with everything that is being absorbed. Yet there is nary a dull moment throughout. It is not often in a film that everything comes together as nicely as it did here.
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