The Upside Down Swan - A review of ‘Black Swan’

*Contains Spoilers*

(This blog post has grown much larger than I intended.  I started including footnotes.  Ridiculous. So I took them out.  Sorry.)

So I went to see the critically lauded and multiple award nominated film ‘Black Swan’ last night.  Whilst being daubed in ‘laud’ and dripping in nominations does, I’m sure, help to get bums on seats, it can also raise audience expectations and lead to disappointment.  I’m afraid that this was the feeling I had on leaving the cinema.  So what (for me) went wrong?

Well I should say first that there’s a lot of talent at work in this film.  Natalie Portman can clearly act and really shows it here.  Darren Aronofsky is a director who’s not afraid to tackle difficult or challenging material (who else this side of Terry Gilliam would have dared to make ‘The Fountain’?).  Mila Kunis is another one of a generation of talented Hollywood actresses who are reduced to knocking out ‘kooky girlfriend in rom-com’ roles because there are no more significant parts available to them.  Vincent Cassel is always good value as a Gallic rotter, Barbara Hersey provides good support and once again Winona Ryder makes you wonder where the hell she’s been since the 90’s (it’s nice that my main teenage heartthrob is still so utterly beautiful).  The set design’s good, the choreography works well, it’s atmospherically shot and lit.  The effects are in turn subtle, unsettling and then shocking.  So why am I not raving about this film?  Well the problem is in the story and the script.  It seems to have been written by a precocious and highly strung teenager and then screen tested in front of an audience of less precocious but equally highly strung teenagers and the simplified until they can follow it.  It has no subtlety, no real psychological insight, no understanding of creativity and a confused and dubious set of moral values.

(Oh - my apologies to any teenagers reading this.  I’m not talking about you here.  You are reading my blog and so are the discerning intelligentsia of your generation.  Work hard, don’t do drugs and thanks in advance for paying my pension.  Word. xxx).

What do I mean by no subtlety?  Well Natalie Portman‘s character ‘Nina’ is supposed to be childlike.  We get this early on.  She dresses like a pre-pubescent girl and she lives with her mom who (s)mothers her.  Fine – character established, let’s get on with the story.  But then we see her bedroom.  It’s all in while and pink. LIKE A LITTLE GIRLS BEDROOM.  It’s full of cuddly toys.  LIKE A LITTLE GIRLS BEDROOM.  Her mum tucks her in to bed at night.  LIKE SHE’S A LITTLE GIRL.  Her mum opens her music box (which plays ‘Swan Lake’ of course) to play her to sleep. LIKE SHE’S A LITTLE GIRL.  Are you getting the subtext here?  Another example of this heavy handedness is when Nina asks the ballet director for the part of the Swan Queen and he says ‘No’.  ‘Ok’ she replies meekly and tries to walk out.  The ballet director challenges her ‘Aren’t you going to fight for it?’ and again the story goes *clunk*.  We’ve just seen that she’s not going to fight for it.  The script has set up the situation, the actress portrays the insecurity and passivity of the character but the script has to hammer it home with extra unneeded dialog.  *Clunk*.  This happens again and again.  It doesn’t respect the intelligence of the audience and shows a real lack of confidence in the writing.

The lack of psychological insight is really troubling too.  I don’t think that when people suffer from mental breakdowns it’s as spectacular as it’s made to look here.  It seems unlikely that a woman under such pressure would start having visions and hallucinations.  A breakdown would be a lot less dramatic and actually a lot more harrowing.  Watching a woman disintegrate through the pressure of almost achieving her dreams would be absolutely heartbreaking.  The crippling nervousness, the anxiety, the helplessness to do anything about it would be so much easier for the audience to sympathise and empathise with because they’re situations we’ve all experienced to some extent.  I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that relatively few of us have stabbed ourselves in the stomach whilst fighting an imaginary version of ourselves.  It's all very spectacular and entertaining but emotionally un-involving.  I felt that the film used lots of visual tricks and shocks to dazzle the audience and to keep us guessing rather than rely on good writing and acting.  I’m not sure that these tricks even added up to anything in the end.  To what extent was Mila Kunis' character 'Lily' actually trying to sabotage Nina and to push her over the edge and to what extent was it paranoia?  We’re never really told and I think the film would be stronger if it were either a study of one fragile woman being driven over the edge by another (like ‘Rebecca’) or a straight study of a paranoia breakdown. 

Let’s come onto the most disturbing aspect of the film which is the way it equates childlike innocence with the white ‘good’ swan and sexuality and sexual awakening with the black ‘evil twin’ swan.  I’m really surprised that a mainstream film in the 21^st century would make this old fashioned and bigoted connection. That sex is evil and that arrested development, emotional immaturity, repression and virginity are good.  The film is even pretty gutless here, Nina’s sexual awakening coming in a dream sequence and a fairly male friendly one at that in a lesbian love scene with Lily (named for Lilith presumably in another bit of heavy handed scripting).  Actually I suppose that the ‘taboo’ nature of this liaison means that Nina has to feel guilty about giving into sexual longing and so rather than being liberated, or more likely thinking, ‘ok, well that was nice but my world view is actually pretty much the same’ she gets to agonise about it.  This is the bit of the film that made me feel it was most adolescent, the simultaneous fear of sex with the belief that once you’ve ‘done it’ you’re somehow granted a pass to a new world of grown up emotions and maturity.  I thought this element of the film was quite unhealthy.

My final bug-bear is with its idea of, and portrayal of, artistic genius and the creative process.  The tired old cliché (that expression itself is course a cliché – oh the irony) of madness and genius being inter-twined.  The idea that an artist has to burn themselves up in order to create a work of perfection (Oh - we also get an image of Nina looking up at a statue of Icarus in a museum at some point.  With those wings he looks a bit like a swan.  And might she too fly too close to the sun?  That *clunk* you just heard was the script again.  And actually Icarus wasn’t the genius anyway was he?  It was Daedalus and he survived the crossing from Crete to Sicily, because he flew the middle way and because he wasn’t an idiot.)  What a load of rubbish.  It belittles those people who do have the talent to create great art, ignoring the years of work to gain the talent to express themselves and then the huge amounts of work to create the art itself.  If we could just chose to torture ourselves into being great artists it’d be so much easier.  Sadly you need talent and massive amount of application.  The idea that to portray a trait or emotion you must have experienced it is such a load of juvenile tosh.  I’ve only read half a book on acting (no, really) and I know this is silly.  If it were true we’d have no actors capable to portraying difficult characters, they’d all be too psychologically scarred to get up on stage. 

This film seems to be a step backwards for Aronofsky.  Having eschewed the tricksy camera work he first showcased in Pi and then took to an extreme in ‘Requiem for a Dream’* (great title – terrible film, stuck in the simplistic 1950’s drugs morality of its dated source material and actually very like ‘Black Swan’), he told a more human story in the wildly ambitious but very worthwhile ‘The Fountain’ and then restrained everything in ‘The Wrestler’ to create his best film.  The Wrestler is a film that absolutely deserves its plaudits.  Its characters are utterly believable.  Complicated, flawed, sympathetic and human.  The story is simple and driven organically by the actions of the protagonists.  The story assumes tragic proportions in a very classical way, through fate and circumstance, all the players doomed from the start and unable to help themselves, even when they see the writing on the wall.  It’s a modern masterpiece and in it Mickey Rourke gives the performance of a lifetime. 

The irony with ‘Black Swan’ is how un-swanlike it is.  Swans are supposed to glide along smoothly and apparently effortlessly, propelled by a churning mechanism that’s hidden from sight.  This swan sits dead in the water, thrashing away and going nowhere.

David Millington

1^st February 2011

Nottingham

* Requiem for a Dream’s most significant cinematic legacy is perhaps its soundtrack which seems to be the go to ‘exciting, climax building’ piece for cinematic trailers (best used for the super exciting LOTR Two Towers trailer).  And this was written by the now prolific and really rather good Clint Mansell.  Clint’s interesting because he first cut his teeth as the singer and lead guitarist of ‘Grebo’ mainstays ‘Pop Will Eat Itself’, who you might remember from the late 80’s and early 90’s with such fun hits ‘Def Con One’, ‘Can U Dig It’ and the 1990 World Cup Anthem ‘Touched by the Hand of Cicciolina’.  (Aren’t you glad that you don’t have all this stuff in your head? Is it any wonder I get so little done?).  It always makes me smile when I see his name after a film.  Who would have thunk it?  There’s hope for us all.