KRR: So, 'Black Swan' is the Only Nail-Biter That Will Make You Stop Biting Your Nails.

There's a moment in David Fincher's 1997 movie, The Game, that really encapsulates everything I'm about to write about. In this ten second scene, Sean Penn, who's way too dialed up in the thralls of a nervous breakdown, is screaming about the company that's set up his brother and him. He screams, "Ah, it's so fucked! They just fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you! And just when you think it's all over, that's when the real fucking starts!"

That moment is exactly how I feel about Darren Aronofsky's psychological horror film, Black Swan. The film, starring Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, about four minutes of Winona Ryder, and an Oscar-winning performance from Natalie Portman, turns ten this year, so - in the spirit of Spooktober - I decided to revisit it a decade after its release. Black Swan follows the story of Nina (Portman), who's been cast as the lead dancer in a prestigious ballet's new version of Swan Lake, and her degrading mental state, as the pressure of the role leads to her psyche's tipping point. It is at once a beautiful dance movie, and a deep, dark drama packed with disturbing visual tricks and plenty of body horror. It's the kind of film where you can't help but think that the director is trying to do just what Sean Penn was so upset about: fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

-SPOILERS AHEAD-

There isn't any scene I want to start with less than the cuticle scene, but truthfully there's nowhere else to properly start reviewing this movie. The scene is short and simple: Nina picks at her cuticle, pulling the skin back further and further until it runs nearly the entire length of her finger. She then clutches at her very bloody finger, but when she opens her palm, she finds that her finger is fine. She had only imagined it. Why we're starting with this grotesquely simple scene? Two reasons.

First, because it's the WORST moment in the movie. I can't remember the last time I had to look away from the movie I was watching, but whenever it was, it doesn't hold a candle to this scene. I had to nearly close my laptop all the way to get through it. It's terrifying and disgusting, and the worst part is that you can feel it. I mean it's so visceral that you can literally feel it on your own hands. Ugh. It makes me shudder just thinking about it. God, what an awful scene. Definitely not the greatest moment in cinema history, that's for sure.

The second, and more important, reason to start with this scene is because of what it represents. It's a short scene, no more than a few seconds, but it captures the twisted brutality at the heart of this film. For Nina, the pain of a bloody cuticle tearing up her finger is real, even if the injury isn't. The same is true for audiences. The pain of that scene lies in the disturbance to our viewing experience. Aronofsky is able to keep us perpetually on edge, and at times, push us just over it. 

Those eyes haunt me.

The most effective way Black Swan straddles that razor's edge of anxiety is with its cinematography. One such cinematography trick utilized is by having the characters and set pieces move just a beat ahead of the camera. For example, after showing us a maimed Winona Ryder in a hospital bed, Nina backs away from her bed only to back into a nurse entering the room. It isn't quite a jump scare - Black Swan doesn't quite stoop that low at any point, nor does it need to - but it does punish you if you let your guard down. That's just one small example though. The movie is littered with bigger, better examples. As in, there's a scene where Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman are dancing at a nightclub. It's the typical club scene: colorful, strobe-lit, should probably come with an epilepsy warning. But what's different about this scene is there are over 1,000 manipulated images within it. And those images? They're of Natalie Portman. Every flash of every dancer that isn't Mila Kunis in this 45-second club scene is Natalie Portman. It's the subatomic details, those flashes that make you think your eyes are playing tricks on you, that make this movie feel so frenzied. Frenzied and vast. This movie doesn't suffocate you with its paranoia. Instead, it amplifies it. In every scene besides the climactic dance at the end, there is a mirror, and just as in the club scene, often it is hard to tell if what appears in the mirror is an actual reflection or a disoriented version of the real world. Movie-watchers who are prone to fear are often encouraged to mute the movie when it gets too scary. It's said that if you can't hear it, then it can't scare you. Black Swan accounts for that. It can be muted, but as long as you're watching it, it's nestling its way into your amygdala. It's impossible to get a grasp on reality when you can't be sure what you're seeing is real.

And even then, if you are sure what you're seeing is real that doesn't always make you feel better. Because what's "real" in this movie - as opposed to a simple visual trick - is pretty disturbing. As Sean Penn says, "That's when the real fucking starts!" Without giving too much away for readers who haven't seen the movie, the psychological meltdown that Natalie Portman is suffering through is two-fold: There's a deep paranoia that Lily, played by Kunis, is trying to steal her part, as she believes (and has been convinced) that she isn't good enough for it, and there's an increasing sense of body dysmorphia as it becomes clear that Nina might be physically turning into a black swan. Yeah, it's some fucked up shit. Now, of course, Portman isn't actually turning into a black swan (or is she?), and instead it's a veiled metaphor for Nina becoming a woman capable of standing up for herself and her art, rather than a scared little girl who still lives with Mommy. But, for audiences, what's real hardly matters. The metaphoric visualization of her transformation into a bird is just as disturbing. It's not like Birdman's cool transformation. It's far more monstrous. (On a side note, there's a compelling case to be made that Birdman and Black Swan are two versions of the same movie, but I won't get into that here.)

The costumes and lighting are also brilliant.

Now, while that may sound particularly beautiful to some readers and like a major reason not to watch this movie for others, that's not everything that Black Swan has going for it. If anything, those are the nerdy subliminal things most viewers don't care about, but that I have to focus on because I'm just a goddamn weirdo. The reason to watch this movie now (if you aren't a weirdo) is the same reason people went to see it when it came out: for Natalie Portman. To say she's great is an understatement. She's always great. If there were justice at the Oscars (if you're familiar with this blog, you know I'm a firm believer that there isn't) she would have received an Oscar for The Professional, her career debut when she was a child. She's just that great a performer. In Black Swan, Portman is no different. The problem with how good Portman is in this movie, is that it eclipses the other performers: Namely, Vincent Cassel. 

Vincent Cassel, who plays Thomas, the ballet's director and the instructor that Portman is constantly trying to woo, is such an asshole in this movie. And I know it isn't actually him, it's his character, but when watching the film it was really difficult for me to figure out if I didn't like Cassel's performance or if I just didn't like Thomas. It's a tough delineation to draw. Because Thomas is a sexual predator, a man who abuses his power to get himself off with his ballerinas. And Cassel is... not that. I don't know Cassel, and I'm not looking anything up about him, but I imagine he's a much lovelier person than Thomas. Regardless though, I simply don't think Cassel is as good in this as Portman, which hurts the movie, because he is exclusively on-screen when she is. (This is a diluted version of the problem I had with Laura Dern winning Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards for Marriage Story. Dern is never on-screen without Scarlett Johansson, and Scarlett is just better in every scene. So, if you aren't the best part of any scene, do you really deserve the Best Supporting Award? I don't think so.) The only person who really holds their own with Portman in this movie is Mila Kunis, which is an interesting thing to say, because I don't often think of her as a "serious" actor. That's not a knock. I think her Black Swan performance is in the realm of Seth Rogen in Steve Jobs. These are typically comedic actors, showing us through a major film that they're actually serious actors who can fill big minutes in a major dramatic piece. Everyone has their role, and I think in Black Swan, Mila fills hers perfectly. (Forgive me, but I'm not giving breath to Winona Ryder or Barbara Hershey.)

At this point, you're probably assuming I'm going to give this movie a very high score, something upwards of a nine. Well, I'm not. Because as masterful as the acting and the horror of the movie is, there are some fundamental problems with the story.

The plot's main conflict lies in Nina's push for perfection. She wants to prove she can be perfect as the lead in Swan Lake, and while pushing to prove that, she undergoes a mental breakdown. And while I've covered the breakdown pretty thoroughly, I haven't touched on that core conflict: that she can prove she deserves the part. That's where this movie loses me a bit. Because, until the very end, we aren't sure that she actually is deserving of the lead part. We see her dance gracefully, sure, and we see how much work she puts in, yes, but more often, we see her fail to execute the performance. The first time we see a character actually pull off the black swan dance, it's Lily dancing it, not Nina. So, while I'm sympathetic to our main protagonist and her paranoia that Lily is trying to steal her role, there's also a part of me that thinks - you don't deserve this role. I love you. You're great. But maybe you just don't have what it takes. Maybe Thomas, who was thinking with his dick and not his brain, just fucked up. Maybe he should have chosen Lily. I think if we knew that Nina was better than her rehearsals suggest, that would make this movie so much better. But we don't. It's hinted at. It's alluded to. We're supposed to believe she's better, just so we can feel the surprise and pay-off at the end when she nails it, but we have no actual proof that she is. What makes that so frustrating is that it wouldn't take much for us to know. If we saw a scene early in the movie of Nina crushing the black swan dance alone in a practice room, we would know she could do it. Maybe she just can't when there's pressure and dance partners around. I don't know. Instead, we don't get that one little scene. We get a dream sequence at the opening of the film that shows Natalie Portman is a good ballerina. The fuck does that tell us about Nina though? Nothing. Because it's a dream. We can be impressed with the leaps and strides Natalie Portman took to perfect ballet for this movie, but we have no reason based in reality to believe Nina is capable of executing. I wish we did. It's not a big ask. I think Aronofsky is actually asking more of us to just believe that a girl with a deteriorating mental condition, a sexy kiss, and a dream deserves the lead role. 

That means that I leave Black Swan in awe of its technical beauty but surprised that Nina is able to achieve the perfect performance. I wish though, that I left it in awe of its technical beauty and relieved that Nina is able to achieve what we knew she could do all along, despite her mental collapse. And because it's a piece that peddles in the minutiae of filmmaking, it's the broader brushstrokes that Black Swan is missing. Now, I still love all those little things that Aronofsky made such a diligent effort to get right. I just wish that he'd taken a step back to see that the larger picture is slightly out of focus.

So, where does that leave us? Black Swan, an imperfect movie about perfection, is as beautiful as it is twisted in its details. And while the story leaves much to be desired, it still scares the living hell out of me. It is definitely not a fun movie to sit through. It is, by all measures, meant to fuck with you. But it does have its place. Whether or not you see that as one of the 21st century's modern classics, a metaphor meticulously crafted to tell two stories simultaneously, a psychological horror film that overachieves on every level, or as an art piece so disturbing and visually haunting that it's impossible to get through without turning off the screen - that choice is yours. Like Nina, Black Swan turns itself over and over in hopes of discovering its true identity. The reality or the delusion? I, for one, see it as both.

Birds Aren't Real.

Black Swan KRR: 8.4/10