Fancy Footwork

Natalie Portman as a tormented dancer in Darren Aronofskys movie.
Natalie Portman as a tormented dancer in Darren Aronofsky’s movie.Photograph by Niko Tavernise

Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is a luridly beautiful farrago—a violent fantasia that mixes the tensions of preparing a new production of “Swan Lake” with sex, blood, and horror-film flourishes. Natalie Portman is Nina, a soloist in a New York ballet company who lives with her mother (Barbara Hershey), a hysterically protective retired dancer, and falls under the sway of the brilliant artistic director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). In the story of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” an evil magician controls two beauties who are swans by day and women by night: Odette, the White Swan, associated with purity, and Odile, the evilly seductive Black Swan, who is the magician’s daughter. Both roles are usually performed by a single dancer—it’s an extraordinary challenge. In the movie, Thomas tells Nina that she has the talent and the temperament to dance the White Swan but that she’s too frigid for the dark side. He becomes her sorcerer, dominating and inflaming her, caressing and coming on to her, and Nina, a virtuous, hardworking girl, begins to develop black-swan attributes. She appears to have a nasty double, a second version of herself, which she catches glimpses of here and there. She drinks, takes drugs, has sex. Rashes and abrasions appear on her back, where wings might be; her toes web together; and she picks at her fingers until they bleed, stigmatizing herself. At the same time, another young dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), also appears to have two personalities: a friendly one, who encourages Nina; and a predatory one, who wants to destroy her and dance the Odette/Odile role herself. Nina moves toward opening night in a panic, still not sure if Thomas will let her dance.

Freud said that meeting one’s doppelgänger in life or in dreams produces sensations of the uncanny, but isn’t one double enough? This movie has three sets: there’s also the washed-up ballerina (played, in a cruel bit of casting, by Winona Ryder) who previously danced the role, and whom Nina tries to emulate—she steals lipstick from her dressing room—as well as replace. Actually, there are four, if you count Nina’s mother, with whom Nina shares a clammily intimate relationship and the same pulled-back hair and clenched manner. “Black Swan” turns Freud’s uncanny into shtick; the sinister elements are overloaded and overdetermined. After a while, you realize that the film is a case of ersatz formalism disguising chaos. For instance, the “All About Eve” business with dancers preying on one another was retained from a discarded screenplay by Andrés Heinz, who worked on the final version of “Black Swan” with Mark Heyman and John J. McLaughlin. As a device, it’s clunky and redundant. So are the repeated scenes of Nina entering her Upper West Side apartment, which becomes a house of demons, and a freezing wash of horror-film sounds that play again and again. The Grand Guignol can be understood as an invasion of the supernatural into a dancer’s life, or as the delusions of an ambitious young perfectionist. Aronofsky has it both ways, aestheticizing insanity and playing scare-movie tricks at the same time.

The film is often ridiculous, yet there are startlingly beautiful sequences; right at the beginning, Nina dances, under a spotlight, in a white tutu against a vibrant black background. Aronofsky, working with the cinematographer Matthew Libatique and the designer Thérèse DePrez, has produced the hard glitter of an old mirrored music box. The filmmakers use four principal colors, representing the psychological and physical moods of the story: white, black, pink (the color of the stuffed animals in Nina’s bedroom), and gash red. This crazed aestheticism has its own kind of passion. “Black Swan” certainly isn’t bland like “The Turning Point”; instead, it bears some resemblance in spirit to the death-haunted “Red Shoes.” Aronofsky understands and reproduces the controlled savagery of ballet—the stressed, flaring emotionalism of young dancers, the wracking spiritual and physical demands made on breakable bodies. He films the dancing with a circling, weaving, bobbing camera that seems to be moving (almost dancing itself) in rhythm with the music. The performance sequences at their best come close to ecstasy, while the rehearsal sequences are disciplined and businesslike.

Off the dance floor, however, “Black Swan” is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist. Almost every sequence is shot with a handheld camera, and poor Nina can’t go anywhere—not even down a corridor—without the camera stalking her. Aronofsky keeps us in a state of anxiety from beginning to end. He’s such an extremist that he never creates a normal reality to take off from, so the outbreaks of violence don’t shock as much as they might.

As Thomas, the French star Vincent Cassel is a portrait of studliness (even his nose is virile). Tall and straight, he has a superb presence; he blusters through the role and gets away with it. Natalie Portman has a sinewy dancer’s body and the control and the single-mindedness to play a driven, unhappy girl. With her perfect features, she also has the taut, masklike beauty that so many female dancers attain. Portman has been dancing since she was a child, and, aided by some digital finishing, she does well enough in the ballet sequences. That is, she doesn’t make a fool of herself, which, given the possible comparisons, is saying a great deal. But Aronofsky has coaxed her into giving a dolorous performance that’s often on the verge of caricature. She suppresses tears, then trembles, cries, crumples—she’s always collapsing—and her neck chords stand out like ship’s rigging. Cold-eyed viewers will see “Black Swan” less as a movie about ballet than as a movie about the torture of a young woman. Dance lovers will find it so over the top that they are likely to be amused. The picture is too bizarre to be a desecration of “Swan Lake,” which is as indestructible as “Macbeth.”

“Black Swan” says that a dancer must enter into the irrational and the erotic—even destroy herself—in order to make art. That is, if you don’t get laid, and you aren’t ready to kill your rival or yourself, you can’t be a great dancer. But the director’s erotic and punitive notion of art is his own obsession, not a dancer’s. His movies are about people destroying their bodies: the drug addicts in “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), Mickey Rourke razoring his flesh in “The Wrestler” (2008). In “Black Swan,” Aronofsky goes all the way with his taste for mutilation. He imposes his own bloodlust on a woman’s mind and then turns her into a myth of sacrifice. “Black Swan” is a pompous, self-glorifying, and generally unpleasant interpretation of an artist’s task. The movie has the Romantics’ fascination with death without their spiritual eloquence, which turns morbidity into art. “Black Swan” is every bit as beautiful as a tray of Russian Easter eggs. Maybe someone should crack one of them on Aronofsky’s noggin and bring him to his senses.

Jake Gyllenhaal has played his share of melancholy young men, but in “Love and Other Drugs,” set in the nineteen-nineties, his eyes and body are alive, and he’s active in bed, both as a pleasure and as a professional aid. He plays Jamie Randall, a self-hating but flirtatious and irresistible pharmaceutical rep for Pfizer. He and his mentor, Bruce (Oliver Platt), besiege clinics and doctors, hoping to persuade them to prescribe Pfizer’s Zoloft rather than Lilly’s Prozac. (They don’t have much trouble getting them to take on Viagra.) The movie, directed by Ed Zwick, and written by Charles Randolph, Marshall Herskovitz, and Zwick, who adapted a memoir by Jamie Reidy, has some broadly played but knowing satirical sequences of drug reps trying to seduce medical secretaries and bribing and pimping for doctors.

Then, suddenly, the movie shifts away from satire: Jamie meets Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway), a beautiful young woman with early-onset Parkinson’s, who likes sex but doesn’t want love, since she knows her condition will impose an unmanageable burden on any man who falls for her. Hathaway’s features are so big and bright that they seem to take over her face; she can look like a clown in some shots, and ravishing in others. But she’s not just vivid and generously expressive; she has become, in her last few roles, a high-flying actress who reveals everything that’s inside her characters. Through sheer conviction, she makes the defiant-dying-girl tearjerking clichés work. And her sex scenes with Gyllenhaal are the most intimate and erotic glimpses of romantic love that we’ve seen in American movies in years. The two of them lounge naked in bed, talking, making love, finessing a scene of Jamie’s impotence that could have been embarrassing but becomes genuinely funny. “Love and Other Drugs” has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. ♦