Black Swan

To say that Black Swan moved me would be an understatement.  I could feel my heart pounding during the last twenty minutes of the movie, and when it was over, I spent a few minutes sitting in my car before starting to drive home, waiting for myself to settle down.  Finally I just had to start driving, because if I waited for myself to settle down, I would have been the weird lady who spent three hours sitting in the theater parking lot.

Black Swan explores a lot - the quest for perfection in art, the world of ballet, the slow unraveling of a fragile mind - through the journey of Nina Sayers as she attempts to take on the dual roles of the White and Black Swan in a production of Swan Lake.  The story hinges on a simple central question: Can Nina master the two roles? 

When we see ballet dancers, what strikes us is their bodies, their ability to spin on their toes and leap into the air and move with an unnatural grace. I could see a lesser movie focusing on these elements when trying to answer the central question of the movie, using lengthy practice montages and maybe an injury late in the second act to add dramatic tension.  There would probably be a signature special move someplace in the choreography that Nina Just Can’t Get - maybe a special  backbend, or a series of nine spins instead of eight - and a big part of the tension would be whether Nina could get the move down by opening night. 

What makes Black Swan special is that it recognizes that the bodies of ballet dancers don’t set them apart from the rest of us; their bodies are just a reflection of their commitment to their art, and it’s that commitment, that willingness to give themselves over to something greater in the pursuit of a specific kind of art, that we see reflected in their physical forms.  Black Swan explores that commitment - what it means, what it costs - through Nina’s struggles, in a way that takes the story beyond the world in which it’s staged.  Yes, it’s a movie about ballet, but it’s also about the pursuit of greatness in any kind of art.  It’s about how the things we love can consume us. 

Natalie Portman’s performance as Nina defines the movie.  We see the world of the movie as Nina sees it and - more importantly - how she experiences it.  I’ve never had strong feelings about Natalie Portman as an actress, but she blew me away in this movie; there’s a transparency to her performance, an openness, that drew me in from the very beginning and carried through to the movie’s last moments.