Darren Aronofsky's ballerina-crackup drama Black Swan opens with a dream sequence in which a wispy-boned young woman twirls and flutters to the strains of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. She dabs at the stage with her dainty pink shoes, the stage lights shining through her all-too-translucent tutu. Suddenly, a figure appears from the darkness -- why, it's a handsome male dancer dressed all in black! He looks really nice, not scary at all, but wouldn't you know it? Suddenly, he turns into a swaggering black swan, flapping his arms all masculine-like and threatening to take our little cygnet -- who we now can see is Natalie Portman -- doggy-style. What ever could this dream mean? One thing's for sure: It ain't about dancing poultry.
In Black Swan all is not as it appears -- in fact, everything is hokier, more obvious, more hilarious than it's intended to be. There's hardly a dull moment here: Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique give us something to look at, or at least giggle over, every minute, whether it's Portman's Nina-the-ballerina sprouting tiny, spiky feathers from her shoulder blades or Winona Ryder, as a spurned elder-ballerina, going all crazy-eights.
But I find it impossible to take Black Swan as seriously as Aronofsky does. He seems to think he's made a serious descent-into-madness drama about the bun-and-bunion set, but everything he does is calculated, and not in the good way. He may want to sweep us up in a whirl of madness, and occasionally he succeeds. But too often he's practically ticking items off a checklist -- Mother-daughter conflict: check! Bulimia incident: check! Crazy-hot lesbo scene: check! -- going through the motions of the dance rather than giving himself over to it. Black Swan is hifalutin' hokum, but Aronofsky isn't loose enough, or canny enough, to be in touch with its camp soul.
Portman's Nina, a sweet, New York dancer who's been in the corps a little too long, wants very badly to be cast as the lead in a new production of Swan Lake: If she doesn't make her mark now, she never will. But the director of the company, Vincent Cassel's ogre-satyr Thomas, doesn't think her heart is black enough to pull off the darker side of the part. Enter bad-gal ballerina Lily (Mila Kunis): She smokes! She gives Nina heavy-duty long-wearing feel-good drugs the night before a big rehearsal! She wears dark eye makeup! She also tempts Nina into a world of darkness by nuzzling at the forbidden girl parts between her legs, though there's some question about whether or not such billing and cooing actually happened. (See paragraph one: Sexy dreams appear to be a recurring thing with Nina.) What on Earth could Lily, with her wicked, wicked ways, possibly want?
Wide-eyed Nina navigates the terrible-wonderful world of ballet, undermined at every turn by her fellow dancers (they whisper savagely behind her back -- or do they?), her passive-aggressive former-dancer mom (played by Barbara Hershey, who's all teeth and collarbones) and of course by Thomas, who's always lurking in the shadows with his pointy devil face, at one point exhorting Nina to -- I kid you not -- "Go home and touch yourself." (She obliges, finishing the job by humping her bunched-up comforter.) Tortured by all manner of evil forces, Nina the naif suffers, oh! how she suffers, and not just the usual bloody-toe ballerina stuff. She also indulges in all sorts of self-inflicted degradation, because, as John Lennon said, Genius is pain. Or at least a really bad hangnail.
Black Swan ought to be satisfying pulp in the way Aronofky's last picture, The Wrestler, was. But The Wrestler had Mickey Rourke, who, with his battered face and lamb-soft heart, put some emotional muscle behind the story's rags-to-riches-to-rags conventionality. Black Swan has only Natalie Portman, who gives the best female lead performance of 1955. She's both the suffering, doe-eyed good girl and the all-too-easily corruptible minx. With her sturdy but delicate bones and demi-regal carriage, Portman is a believable ballerina. But she plays the material straight instead of pushing it straight over the top. Kunis, on the other hand, knows how to vamp it up without amping it up. She plays her character like a dark version of Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards, a girl who greets the world with her vagina dentata wide-open. She's gonna make it after all.
Black Swan is quite often fun to watch, especially the hallucinatory wig-wag that comes at the end. But Aronofsky can't see that this material -- written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin, from a story by Heinz -- is really just a high-toned version of Showgirls, a movie that's frequently derided as being simply "bad," although Paul Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing, and he was honest about his goals: He wanted to give us a glitzy, over-the-top show-biz fable, and boy, did he ever.
Plenty of critics have already made comparisons between Black Swan and Michael Powell's The Red Shoes, but the only things the two movies have in common is that they're about ballet and obsession. Powell, aside from being the ultimate craftsman, infused his movie with passion from the inside out. Aronofsky goes at the notion of suffering for one's art as if it were a science experiment, a principle you can prove with a formula. He also isn't as in tune with the female psyche as, say, a director like Douglas Sirk was. I'm all for the sympathetic imagination: We wouldn't have Madame Bovary if Flaubert hadn't had the audacity to tell a story from a woman's point of view. But Aronofsky stares down Nina's girlish obsessions, and her determination to be perfect, as if he were writing a psych textbook. Mummy is controlling and demanding; therefore, notions of food, home and comfort are conflicted for Nina. Aronofsky proves this by showing, in an early scene, Mama Bear serving her cub a breakfast consisting of half a pink grapefruit and a tiny poached egg, and the two exclaim over how "pretty" the grapefruit is, a ritual they've obviously been through many times before.
But Aronofsky doesn't cut much deeper than that into the allegedly female trait of yearning for perfection, of always wanting to be the good girl, of fearing that you might displease mother. Nor does he loop into the pure, melodramatic craziness of what it means to live for your art: Everything in the movie is as meticulously controlled as Nina's meager breakfast allotment. Cassel's Thomas, in between making slimy advances on Nina, admonishes her over and over again that to be a great dancer, she must let herself go. "Lose yourself," he tells her. But it's Aronofsky who can't let himself go. Though he seems willing to go over the top with this outsized, old-fashioned story of repression and mad ambition, the unfortunate truth is that he's not Douglas Sirk or Michael Powell -- he's not even Paul Verhoeven. Thomas also tells Nina, "Surprise yourself so you can surprise the audience." It's great advice -- too bad Aronofsky didn't add it to his checklist.
_Editor's note: Portions of this review appeared earlier, in a different form, in Stephanie Zacharek's coverage of the Venice Film Festival