Black Swan Oscar Buzz

Natalie Portman costumed as Nina Sayers

The New York Times
December 30, 2010

Natalie Portman Embraces Monster and Victim
By A. O. SCOTT

THE subject of “Black Swan” — a leading candidate for the most misunderstood film of 2010 — is the relationship, in art, between technique and emotion. Ballet, the specific art form in question, is shown to require endless practice and grueling physical discipline. Bodies, in particular the bodies of young women, are stretched and twisted into unnatural postures, and the cost of the fleeting, breathtaking grace they attain is reckoned in close-ups of battered, bloody feet and tendons pulled almost to the snapping point. The toe shoes that are among the principal tools of this torment also seem to be surrogates and scapegoats; they are scraped, mutilated and disfigured by the dancers in a symbolic re-enactment of the violence they perform upon themselves in their ruthless pursuit of perfection.

Is “Black Swan” a realistic portrayal of life in a ballet company? Probably not. Is it an overheated, wildly melodramatic rendering of an artist’s struggle? Without a doubt. And to scold the director, Darren Aronofsky, for what he doesn’t get about dancers or how he looks at women is almost deliberately to miss the point. This is, at bottom, a horror movie. It gathers psychological implications from its chosen milieu and makes them literal, giving flesh to wild metaphors of female sexuality and aesthetic risk.

“Black Swan” is no more about the behavior of ballerinas than its central pretext, “Swan Lake,” is about the habits of birds. It is, rather, an inky, unhinged fairy tale, a swirl of intuitions and sensations visited upon and realized through the body of its star, Natalie Portman.

Ms. Portman appears in nearly every frame of the movie, sometimes more than once. She is reflected in the mirrors that line the walls of the practice salles, in the windows of subway trains passing through dark tunnels, and in the faces of the mysterious doubles — strangers on the street and rivals in the company — that her character, Nina Sayers, mistakes for herself. Nina, who lives with her Freudian nightmare of a mother in a spooky Upper West Side apartment, is a hard-working dancer cast as the lead in a new, revisionist production of “Swan Lake.”

Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the artistic director who serves equally as handsome prince and evil sorcerer in Nina’s increasingly fevered imagination, pushes her to incarnate, within a single performance, both an ideal of inviolate femininity and its dark mirror image. His conception of the swan figure may not be subtle, and it certainly flirts with an old misogynist dualism — the pristine virgin versus the witchy seductress — but it provides the film, and Ms. Portman, with a dramatically potent idea. The white swan and the black represent, above all, the Apollonian and Dionysian poles of art, one restrained and rational, the other unruly, passionate and dangerous.

Thomas pushes Nina, whose delicacy and precision is never in doubt, to “let go,” and her contradictory effort to obey him — to perfect her performance by allowing spontaneity and imperfection into it — is what makes her and undoes her. The forced integration of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses leads to the disintegration of her personality, a literal splitting into two Ninas that takes place in full view of the camera and also entirely, it seems, within the character’s mind.

All of this might be preposterously over the top were it not for Ms. Portman, who not only turns an abstraction into flesh and blood but also takes us inside Nina’s head and under her skin. Much has been made of the punishing regimen that Ms. Portman undertook to prepare for the role, and the results are both ravishing and frightening. When she is not dancing, and sometimes when she is, Nina’s slender, delicate frame can look starved and skeletal, her hollow cheeks and large eyes the features of a death’s head rather than a china doll. And she seems, with her mother and with Thomas, more like a terrified child than an accomplished professional with the skills of an athlete. She is, to some extent, the creature of these two dominating figures, with very little personality of her own and almost no ability to articulate her own desires or feelings other than by trembling, perpetually, on the verge of tears.

In keeping with the logic of “Swan Lake” her liberation — her realization of a self freed from the constraints of other people — takes the form of self-destruction, and it is in mapping this paradoxical process that Ms. Portman conducts her own brilliant counterpoint of instinct and technique. Mr. Aronofsky certainly creates a mood of paranoia and incipient madness, embellishing the traditional horror-movie idiom of tracking shots and shock cuts with eerie sound effects and digital tricks. Ms. Portman is dabbed with stage blood and digital goose flesh, stalked and spied on by the camera, wrapped in the jumped-up Tchaikovskian wail of Clint Mansell’s score.

But in the end it all comes down to the actress, who seems, before our eyes, to be participating in the invention of a new kind of screen performance. In its various iterations, the Method has been about using voice and gesture to express a character’s deep psychological truth. Ms. Portman, like other young actors working with filmmakers who emphasize the visceral and the immediate, seems almost to reverse this process. Nina’s psychological state is evidently part of the artifice of “Black Swan,” but her body, subject to unimaginable (and sometimes unreal) mutations and mutilations, is the film’s ground zero of authenticity.

The pivotal scene is a simple one: Nina, alone in the rehearsal studio, looks at her multiplying mirror images and loses control of them. What follows is a crescendo of madness leading up to her opening night triumph, during all of which it becomes increasingly difficult for the audience — or for Nina — to find the boundary between reality and fantasy. And it is a boundary that Ms. Portman succeeds in erasing by hurling herself, with reckless conviction, into Nina’s world and becoming both the monster and the victim in this horror movie.

Which is another way of saying that she is both the black swan and the white, both the perfectly controlled performer and the pure creature of instinct. We can assure ourselves that Nina does not really turn into a bird. We also know, being sane and disciplined moviegoers, that Ms. Portman — pregnant and engaged (to the movie’s choreographer) and happy in the wake of her latest professional triumph — is not Nina Sayers. But we also know, on the irrefutable evidence of our own eyes, and the prickly sensation of our skin, that she is.

Personal comment: With all the work Natalie Portman put into the role it would be wonderful if she was able to win an Oscar! Box office: Domestic Total as of Jan. 2, 2011: $47,370,000 (Estimate) Production budget, $13,000,000.