Darren Aronofsky: Black Swan

I’ve kept an eye on Darren Aronofsky’s career for over a decade, out of persistent interest if not strong enthusiasm. I’ve lumped him in with nineties U.S. indie auteurs like Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and honorary American Christopher Nolan, and sometimes I’ve thought of him as the figurehead of that movement’s failure to deliver on its early promise. That’s unfair; if anything, I like Aronofsky’s movies better than the increasingly defensive adult juvenilia the Rodriguez/Tarantino/Smith/Nolan axis puts out. Maybe I give him a hard time because he seems to possess greater potential than his peers, and thus leaving it unrealized is a greater crime.

Aronofsky’s remained a sort of black sheep in his crowd: brooding, insistently high-minded (though clearly by his own definition of “high-minded”), overserious to the point of sourness. This has left him bare to the temptations of simple morality play, to which his second film, Requiem for a Dream, represented complete surrender. I’ve never seen but am intrigued by his third, The Fountain, a project reportedly heavy on the visual effects (that’s bad!) yet nearly free of CGI (that’s good!) yet utterly humorless (that’s bad!). I worried when I heard of a looming Robocop remake, more so when I heard Aronofsky might direct. A man needs a sense of humor to pull that off, and Aronofsky’s lack of one has dogged his art since the beginning.

Black Swan shows signs that Aronofsky may now be growing that sense of humor. Green shoots and nothing more, but still. This owes something to the subject matter: if there’s one creative entity less inclined to laughter than Aronofsky, it’s a ballet company. You could call the film a satire of the dance world’s grueling perfectionism: the protagonist, a dancer who’s won the ultra-coveted lead in Swan Lake, enters a paranoid psychological breakdown almost immediately, hounded — so she believes — by a controlling, vicariously-living mother, sabotage-inclined colleagues, a bad scratching habit, and feathers that seem to be sprouting from her skin like Kobo Abe’s cabbage leaves.

It’s hard not to feel dicked around by a premise like this, which grants Aronofsky license to put all kinds of wild stuff onscreen — some brief but energetic lovin’ between lead Natalie Portman and compatriot/rival Mila Kunis has surely long since gone viral — and then be all, “No, wait, that didn’t really happen. It was all in her tortured imagination. Or was it?” But I suppose this tiring, thankless process reflects the lives of dancers like these: they push themselves to the physical breaking point, they vainly hope for a few years of prominence, and even at the absolute top of the heap they’re still fighting, with the utmost bitterness, for crumbs.

The film seems to understand this. The company’s audience looks to be about 110% idle rich, stiff in their seats unless applauding at precisely the appropriate moments. In a rich (and some say cruel) bit of stunt casting, Aronofsky has Winona Ryder play a menacingly spiteful ballerina on retirement’s cusp of whom I would’ve liked to have seen more — and of whom I suspect a great deal lays on the cutting room floor. But these gestures toward the Sisyphean struggle of dance remain just that; once the picture steps into its heroine’s mind, where dance is all, it doesn’t step out.

I don’t know what to read into the fact that the company’s director (played, I feel I must say, by Vincent Cassel) in the first act announces his plans for a fresh, daring, rebellious Swan Lake which, by the third act, turns out to be exactly what I would expect a standard Swan Lake to look like. This is either an intentional commentary on ballet’s ossification or an unintentional commentary on ballet’s ossification. If this is what passes for radical in ballet, no wonder they have to loudly and repeatedly bemoan the supposed rise of philistinism. I kept thinking of Principal Skinner: “Am I so out of touch? No, no — it’s the children who are wrong.”

In this setting, Aronofsky officiates a strange marriage between the refined and the tacky. The film delivers not only the aforementioned ballerina-on-ballerina action but a wide array of strikingly threadbare horror and suspense devices, including but not limited to Barbara Hershey’s unvarnished cosmetic surgery. I seem to recall many a dark shadow darting through the frame. But here’s the weird part: something about all this actually works. As a horror movie, it’s just committed enough to its nonsense — the positive side of Aronofsky’s severe earnestness, perhaps? — to work effectively; as a drama, it’s just complicated enough by that nonsense to be unusual. It uses a heap of genre elements to wriggle most of the way out of genre, and in the mess it makes along the way avoids teaching any lessons. That’s why I suspect it may be Aronofsky’s most fascinating work to date.

Comments

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