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| I so wanted to care ... |
Usually, I have a great sense for film. My two sides - writer and audience - are perfectly attuned. In a good film, the audience in me takes over 100% - I couldn’t care less about analyzing then – I’m just happy to be in whatever world I’ve been allowed to live in for a while. When a film is flawed, the writer takes over instantly and analyzes the shit out of everything. I have great fun doing that, too. So then, generally, good film or bad film, I win – yes, I can have the cake and eat it, too. So what happened with Black Swan? I don’t have a definitive answer – and that bugs me.
Natalie Portman plays Nine Sayers, a ballerina about to become a prima. She has everything you’d want in a protagonist. She has all the odds against her, obstacles from within and from without constantly mounting. She has a powerful goal, she has a Mommie Dearest mother to rebel against, a callous director to contend with, a jealous group of dancers ready to trip her. On top of all that you have Natalie Portman! She looks so beautiful, so vulnerable, so in danger … you’d imagine, with all of the above, you’d be on the edge of your seat for Nina Sayers – you’d be rooting for her, hoping for her, fearing for her… did I? Nope, not an ounce of emotion. Here are the probable reasons:
- Nina is a miserably weak person for most of the film – it's hard to root for someone who continues to get pushed through the story by everyone, including her schizophrenic self.
- Nina doesn’t have a strong antagonist. The director? Hell no. So he’s not the nicest guy around – but he’s not vicious - on the contrary – he wants her to succeed. Her overpowering mother then? Nope – the mother’s a Carrie-like cliché – that mother, if anything, makes Nina’s character even weaker.
- The antagonist then truly is Nina herself – which is beautifully in line with the whole white-swan-black-swan theme of doppelgangers, mirrors and overall schizophrenia. But that, in fact, makes her overall character weaker still – all the less we can root for her.
3 comments:
I got quite irritated with it. Yes, to everything you said in its favor: beautifully shot, well acted, but I just found the whole thing so indulgant. But I find with alot of Aranofsky films (besides The Wrestler), that he seems to prefer giving the audience a mind-fuck rather than just letting the story be told.
Enjoy Munich :0)
Great points, Daniel.
I too found it a good film as an exercise in cinematic style (as are most of his films) but I think it really suffered from its entirely internal POV. Unlike other more sophisticated ‘decent into madness’ movies, which are shamelessly ripped off here, because the entire story is from her POV, we are left without the external perspective we need to become engaged. I can’t call this a mistake, as this was clearly a conscious choice, but a costly one, I think.
All stories require varying degrees of give-and-take symbiosis between the audience and the characters in order for the events of the story to be processed through our own prism of understanding. Without that, we are left with our collective face shoved in the protagonist’s dilemma without the opportunity to participate in it, thereby unable to relate to it emotionally.
That being said, as an exercise in style it was entertaining, but there are toothpaste commercials that are more emotionally engaging.
Very insightful comments here. I'm still learning as a screenwriter but I felt like I wanted to see Natalie Portman's character take more control of the choices she made, as you've noted she's buffeted about by all these forces, but I never felt like she made her stand and "looked it straight in the eye".
I wanted to see her character fight harder for what she wanted (defying her mom by going out to a bar wasn't cuttin' it for me...) so I could care more, but she just kind of surrendered and by that point I wanted her to just fall off that stage and die and put herself out of her self-created misery.
Good watch though, I wish DA didn't have to be SOOO cerebral sometimes but I like his stuff and Natalie was amazing.
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