What Can Dancers, Lesbians Tell Us About This Year's Best Actress Race?

So I know this ballet teacher in New York who was all jacked up on Black Swan before it opened here last weekend. She admits she doesn't see many movies in theaters, but from the trailer ("It looks scary; is it scary?") and a few previews ("The pointe work is on; I'd have to see the rest of it"), she knew enough to be despondent after having been shut out of two sold-out shows on Sunday evening. Thus is the curiosity and anticipation guiding many dancers to Natalie Portman's performance -- a physical, uncompromising bit of work that, so far, has dancers relatively unanimous in their approval. Relative, that is, to those lesbians who wrote off Portman's chief Oscar rival Annette Bening in that "f*cking disgusting" dramedy The Kids Are All Right.

Remember that from last summer? When a vocal group of lesbian critics weighed in with outrage over the concept that [spoiler alert] Julianne Moore's character might threaten not only her long-term relationship with Bening's character but her whole family by sleeping with their kids' sperm donor? Like, repeatedly? And really, outwardly enjoyably? There was the dissenter who "could have puked right there in the aisle," and another one who argued in disbelief, "I'm okay with one of the lesbian moms crossing a line, but that line?" And -- yikes -- this:

One might suspect The Kids Are All Right was produced by Sarah Palin rather than Lisa Cholodenko, a renowned indie film writer and director who herself is a lesbian and a mother. Not only does the lesbian relationship in The Kids Are All Right seem inferior to that of the heterosexual relationship, the daughter in the movie is portrayed as sexually repressed and starved for a father figure, and the two lesbian mothers seem almost disappointed whey they find out their son is not gay.

Cholodenko, clearly having braced herself for a backlash from the lesbian orthodoxy, generally deflected the criticisms in the name of commerce and appeal, telling an interviewer at the time:

"I feel like, it's kind of an interesting intermingling of straight and gay. I felt like, if I really want this to be a mainstream film, that's good. This is really inclusive of gay and straight, and I like that. I like that personally and I like that for this film. I was much more interested in reaching out to the male population than I was concerned about alienating a sector of the lesbian population."

In the end, while Kids did enjoy an even more glowing opening than Black Swan, ambivalent semantics tended to rule the day, such as the commentator who wrote that Moore's character wasn't in fact "negative lesbian" at all but just plain-old bisexual -- and under the cultural circumstances, that's good enough.

Jump ahead to Black Swan, a film with its own bisexual overtones that never tend to get in the way of a good old-fashioned backstage psychodrama. But again: It is dancer-approved? The professional praise to date comes with a few reservations here and there, but let's be honest: It's not like anyone's threatening to puke in the aisles. Most impressed by far was NYC Ballet veteran Wendy Whelan, who chimed in with her approval of both Portman's performance ("a great actress") and the legitimacy of her ballerina's instability:

At one level, one could look at this film as a portrayal of the beginnings of full-blown neurosis and mental illness. But this would, of course, miss the larger truth that dancers learn to take on these subtle head-trips every day. Going to those depths is a unique part of our job as performing artists. Sometimes these head-trips are empowering at other times, terrifying and debilitating, but there is no question that they are part of the game, part of our art, and those that cannot learn to live with them, and work with their power, will be weeded out weaker artists.

And then there was the dancer who said Portman "nails" the bruising physicality of her art and "handicap" of obsessive perfectionism, writing off Black Swan's stage-mom and eating-disorder stereotypes. Yet another was slightly more critical, dismissing Vincent Cassel's directorial politics and Mila Kunis' "amateur 'dancing'" while giving it up to Portman as Nina Sayers [minor spoiler follows for anyone who hasn't seen so much as a trailer]:

The concentration it takes to be a dancer cannot be faked. But Portman, who, we all know by now, spent a year preparing for this role, building on some training as a child, was more convincing. Her back and arms were really working like a dancer's. She knew how to keep her shoulders down by pulling under the shoulder blades. My favorite part was when she sprouts those menacing black wings as Odile. That's when Nina's vivid imagination was used for good, and her face and body showed the pleasure and power of that triumph.

For his part, director Darren Aronofsky wants everybody to know: "It's Nina Sayers' story, and ultimately, it's not really about the dance world, it's about Swan Lake." Well, that and a statuette. But pointe -- er, point -- taken.