Monday Movie Review: Black Swan
Diego's latest Netflix was Black Swan, which St. Frances had seen, and then Diego had watched with Elise, and finally I saw last week.
SPOILER ALERT: When I blog about a movie this long after it's been out, I go under the assumption we've all seen it and we're sitting around a plate of cheese fries at a late-night diner discussing its merits. So I'm gonna talk about the ending.
It's very much a companion piece to The Wrestler, which I saw with Corin and Shephard and thought was nearly perfect. Black Swan is beautiful and disturbing, and powerful, but is not as great an achievement as The Wrestler.
The Wrestler opens up this entire world of semi-professional wrestling to you, with all its colors and sounds, tricks-of-the-trade, and gritty reality. Black Swan, more operatic, more melodramatic, is at once bigger than The Wrestler (it's so over the top and surreal) and smaller: it's narrowly focused on this one performance inside this one building. Because it's a thriller, it needs to be claustrophobic; it benefits from having only three locations: Natalie Portman's studio, Natalie Portman's home, and the one bar she goes to once. This heightens the tenions, and as the audience, we too feel that we cannot escape the pressures and the plot (of the ballet as well as the movie) propelling Natalie Portman to her doom.
But this narrow focus, this restriction to three locations chokes the movie and clips its wings. Who is Natalie Portman, besides a dancer? She has been born, raised and trained to be only a dancer, you say, that is her tragedy. But Mickey Rourcke's tragedy was that he had this whole other life, a daughter, a girlfriend, etc. that was consumed by his professional dedication.
Black Swan is a much an adaption of the tragey depicted in the ballet Swan Lake as it is its own story. But that story, of a White Swan haunted by a Black Swan who is a mirror image of herself, is better suited to the form of a ballet, a wordless performance. The Wrestler, on the other hand, was written to be a movie and takes full advantage of the storytelling powers of the screen. It's the immersion in Mickey Rourke's world that made that movie so watchable and captivating.
