Kyle Kerr

Black Swan

01/16/11 | Movies, Reviews | 0 Comments

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS.  You’ve been warned!

I desperately wanted to see this movie because of a) the really messed up looking trailer, and b) it’s been garnering a lot of media and award attention.  Plus, Natalie Portman is an amazing actress, and I really liked director Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain.

The movie’s been out for a couple of weeks, and I finally got the chance to see it.  I settled in for a tale about a ballet dancer named Nina (Natalie Portman, V for Vendetta and Star Wars: Episodes 1-3), who finally lands the lead role in Swan Lake.  Her innocence and perfectionism are lauded as invaluable traits for the White Swan, though she is encouraged by the show’s director to give more into the dark side, to experience a more wonton lifestyle and lose her inhibitions to bring more out of the evil half of her character, the Black Swan.

Yet as she begins to strip away her introversion and shed her purity, she becomes increasingly paranoid that the director is trying to replace her, and that her friend Lily (Mila Kunis, That 70’s Show and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) is trying to steal her role.  She soon spirals into a world of disillusion and self-doubt, even as her debut as the Swan Queen draws ever closer.

Now, the reason I needed to put a spoiler warning at the top of the page is because, in order for me to tell you why I didn’t like this movie—which, in fact, I didn’t—I need to reveal some things.  The “twist” of the movie is that it’s from the point-of-view of a completely unreliable narrator.  A number of things happen that don’t actually happen, such as Nina and Lily having a drunken/under-the-influence tryst after a wild night on the town, hallucinations of self-mutilation (like tearing a flap of skin off her finger, which disappears a second later), and even a murder (that’s at the very end, and I’ll save the revelation of what actually happens a mystery for now).

I think a lot of people are viewing the unreliable narrator technique as unique, but here’s my issue: I don’t like being blatantly lied to.  It’s one thing to use red herrings, to have sharp turns and sudden dips in the narrative, but to mislead with falsehood is a cheat.  Instead of walking out of the theater with a general sense of awe like most moviegoers, I left thinking “So she imagined it all?”

Was I supposed to leave pondering which scenes were delusions and which were reality?  Probably, but instead I went home frustrated, annoyed by the purposeful misdirection.  At least Mila Kunis didn’t end up being to Natalie Portman what Brad Pitt was to Edward Norton in Fight Club, which was something I considered halfway through, though they thankfully didn’t do.

There were also a couple of things left unexplained, such as Nina’s overbearing, overprotective mother (who seemed to have a couple screws loose herself, though how much of that was really the mother versus her perception of her mother is another question).  Nina also scratched herself bloody with anxiety on several occasions, which is supposed to be some sort of nervous habit I suppose?

However, as disappointed as I was in the storytelling, the movie wasn’t ALL bad.  Natalie did an amazing job with the content she was given, and I feel she fully deserved her Golden Globe nomination (and subsequent win!) for her portrayal of Nina.  Her graceful elegance and understated performance brought believability to a character wracked with turbulent—and oftentimes self-destructive—emotions, and her “stage presence” kept my eyes riveted to the screen.

Mila Kunis was just kind of there, and her character could have been played by a myriad of other actresses without any change to the film (whereas I can’t imagine anyone other than Natalie in her own part).  None of the other actors stuck out enough to mention, save a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo by Winona Ryder so short you’ll barely have time to think, “Hey, was that Winona Ryder?”

I know why the movie is garnering so much attention.  Believe me, I get it.  The thing is, the twist didn’t hook me like it did everyone else.  It just annoyed me, so I can’t bring myself to recommend this to anyone.  Seems like another one to save for the Netflix queue.

5/10

Until next…

Kyle W. Kerr