Black Mark

I've talked about how behind I am on seeing this year's Oscar contending films. So I recently spent a couple hours doing the obvious thing: catching up on last year's nominees.

I watched Black Swan, a Best Picture also-ran that secured Natalie Portman the award for Best Actress. My desire to see her lauded performance was very much at odds with the knowledge that the film was directed by Darren Aronofsky, a director whose work I have not liked at all to this point. The latter force held sway for this past year; the former finally took hold.

The latter was the better instinct.

Black Swan actually managed to cohere to a sensible narrative for nearly half of its running time, a major feat compared to Aronofsky's other films. The story follows an ambitious young ballerina cast in the lead role of Swan Lake. But she becomes increasingly overwhelmed by her desire to perfect the part, increasingly suspicious of a new young starlet who might be out to take her place, increasingly tormented by her washed-up and domineering mother, and... well... increasingly insane.

By the halfway point, the film has transformed (like the swan?) into its true form, a visual landscape of the descent into madness. Plot becomes unimportant; what is real and what is imaginary even less so. The movie instead serves up a procession of meditations on insanity, each more disturbing than the last. Some of them are quite effective at provoking an emotional response (revulsion, usually) but I found the sum total to amount to overkill. In my book, The Machinist is a far more compelling look at a slip into insanity.

Natalie Portman does commit to her role with relentless intensity. Add in the rigors of learning the complex dances, the moments in which she plays dual roles on screen, and the plain showiness of the script, and it's not hard to see how she won the Oscar here. It is a good performance. But I found it (along with Mila Kunis' surprisingly effective turn) merely the thing that made a terrible movie tolerable. That's not the criteria by which I personally would award an Oscar, were it up to me.

I'd grade Black Swan a D+ overall. If you love movies that really use film as a visual rather than narrative medium, then you may well love this movie. But if your tastes hew closer to mine, you'll do well to steer clear.