Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.
The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.
Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit.
The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.
One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.
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