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Movie Review: Black Swan (2010)

Life is full of disappointment. That’s obvious enough, but a person’s success or failure at life, at any component of life, is how well that person copes with disappointment. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is a young woman ill-equipped to deal with these disappointments, which is unfortunate because she faces them nearly every day. She’s a ballerina in a premiere New York City troupe, technically perfect but relegated to background roles because her perfection has rendered her frigid. There are flashes of something brilliant within her, but they’re dull, muted, must be coaxed out. Her director, her co-workers, her ex-ballerina mother—they tell her that she isn’t the kind of dancer who gets offered the glamor part, but Nina proves them wrong when she is cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. The trouble is that she must prove herself worthy of the role, which requires perfection, but also a kind of rage that she doesn’t seem capable of.

Nina is a fragile individual, a porcelain figurine set spinning in a music box. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) has bred Nina like that, from the pink walls of her room to the fact that Nina, unlike most young women her age, has yet to have her ears pierced. Her life is the definition of routine: Wake up, eat breakfast, go to rehearsal, come back, go to sleep. The routine is disturbed by a rash, maybe, or Nina’s inert need to pick at herself, to hunt for and eradicate any flaw or blemish she sees. Her mother dresses and undresses her, obsessively calls her on her cell phone, knows exactly what roles she’s suited to dance. Two things are clear in Nina’s mother: That she wants for her daughter what she gave up as a young woman, and that she wants, as a ballerina, to compete against Nina, even if only her ghost is dancing.

Nina’s fragility works in her favor, to an extent, because the role of the white swan requires a dancer to be removed, fragile and perfect, a dancer capable of expressing love without being able to speak it. She auditions for the part and her director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), tells Nina that she’d be perfect were he only looking for the one role. But his take on Swan Lake is one of duality. Somewhere within the white, virginal swan, there’s got to be something dark, physical, full of lust; a black swan aching to burst from the white one’s fragile cage. He doesn’t see that in her, believes the black swan’s embodiment to be Lily (Mila Kunis), a free spirited ballerina from San Francisco whose lack of technical perfection is more than made up for by the emotion that comes across in her movement.

“You can tell she’s not faking it,” Leroy tells Nina. But if Nina is guilty of anything, it isn’t faking. She’s utterly incapable of hiding herself from those around her, though she’s so obsessed with building a wall around herself that she fails to notice. Obsession plays a big role in Nina’s downfall. She’s obsessed with the rash on her back, obsessed with the technical perfection of her dance, obsessed with becoming somebody who isn’t her. Her deepest desire is to become Lily or Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder), the company’s retiring lead ballerina, but she doesn’t understand what makes these people work, and it seems like the walls are closing in as she constructs them.

Every minute of Black Swan is packed with director Darren Aronofsky’s signature blend of the subtle and the glaringly obvious. For instance, it isn’t enough to demonstrate Lily as Nina’s opposite by showing the difference in their dancing. Lily is tanned and tattooed, a cigarette smoking, pill popping girl from San Francisco. To Nina, pale and socially stunted, Lily is simultaneously alien and goddess. Every compliment paid to Lilly is a deathblow. Every exchange between the two is as forced and awkward as it is disconnected. It’s the same between Nina and her mother, the same between her and Leroy.

This is a bold, audacious film, obsessed with self-destruction, perfection and professionalism. It’s not merely a feminine version of The Wrestler, whose main character also suffered for his profession. Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson was a past-his-prime wrestler living a hardscrabble life in search of one last glorious moment. Plenty of us know people like that, but Nina’s a little different. As a ballerina, she’s an anachronism, some rich philanthropist’s bauble. Somebody like Lily would have learned to live with and accept that fact, but to Nina, dancing isn’t just a job—it’s all she knows. Her downfall isn’t pride, envy or physical limitation. She is pushed to the brink by her insecurities, and it’s there that the darker aspects of her personality lay, waiting to take over.

Rating:

Black Swan. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. With Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers), Mila Kunis (Lily), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy), Barbra Hershey (Erica Sayers), and Winona Ryder (Beth Macintyre). Released December 17, 2010, by Fox Searchlight.

Movie Review: The Book of Eli (2010)

It goes without saying that the book at the center of The Book of Eli is the Bible. In the aftermath of a barely described nuclear holy war, every copy of the Bible has been destroyed save one, which is in the possession of Eli (Denzel Washington), a solitary wandering monk type who knows knives, guns, and good music on top of his considerable knowledge of scripture. The land is not kind, yielding little more than the occasional stray cat to eat. As is becoming more and more common in the post-apocalyptic genre, plenty of humans have done one of two things: Hung themselves in a room for the hero to discover, or turned to cannibalism, allowing the hero to butcher them, qualm-free.

Eli gets both of those things out of the way quickly, first by slaughtering a crew of cannibals who want what’s in his backpack, then by taking the shoes off of a hanging corpse in an abandoned house. The early scene in said abandoned house is a standout. Using his small supply of wet towelettes from KFC, Eli bathes himself while listening to Al Green on a first generation iPod. He looks old and weary. His body is covered with burns. He eats his cat meat alone, preparing for another long day of walking. Like most warrior monks, he wants to do it alone. He does two things with the people who intrude on his path: Kills them, or abandons them. His Bible must go west.

Hoping to recharge his iPod, Eli stumbles into a ramshackle, rusted-out version of every Old West town you’ve ever seen. The town is run by a despotic old white guy with a rich old white guy’s name. You know that Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is despotic and thus the bad guy because he is first shown reading a biography of Mussolini. You know he’s crazy because he wants the Bible, believing that it’s the key to building more rustic towns inspired by the Old West. He believes that people will do whatever he says, so long as it’s in a book that nobody but him can read. Reading is power, after all.

Eli gets into an altercation with a yokel at Carnegie’s bar. This leads to a meeting between Eli and Carnegie, which leads to Eli spending the night, which leads to Eli meeting Solara (Mila Kunis), who is an unwilling prostitute in Carnegie’s employ. She sees Eli’s book. She tells Carnegie that Eli has the book. When Eli refuses to give the book up, a shootout ensues. When that doesn’t kill Eli (but leaves a number of Carnegie’s men dead), a posse is rounded up, loaded into heavily fortified GMCs and sent west in pursuit of Eli. From here, you can guess the following:

  • That the unexpected follower does the unexpected and follows Eli
  • What Eli’s initial reaction to said follower is.
  • What ghastly attempted act upon the follower brings the two together.
  • Why those nice old people who live out in the wasteland have a trap door, a graveyard, and a substantial store of fresh meat.
  • Where the last bastion of humanity is located. (Hint: It’s as ironic as it is iconic.)
  • Whether or not Eli’s mission is divinely purposed.
  • Whether or not Carnigie is right about the Bible.

You can guess at all of that correctly without stumbling upon the film’s GOTCHA revelation, which I won’t spoil. As far as the movie’s religious bent goes, I suppose it just depends on your disposition. As an apostate, I was pretty much gagging on the scene where Eli taught Solara how to pray. She can’t read, the Bible doesn’t exist and she’s never heard of God, but Eli, in the span of about three minutes, makes her pray, thus converting her. The next day, she leads her mom in prayer, which is as necessary to the plot as it is unbelievable. I just can’t imagine belief as a switch waiting to be turned on by some guy who grabs your hands and tells you to close your eyes—conversion experiences in the Bible were more hard won than they are here. And because the Hughes Brothers are in such a hurry to get to the next thing, they forget that it ever happened, a decision that works to undermine the whole “Religion is Power/Belief is Hope” thing and lets Solara down as a character. She’s painfully one note before and after that scene, resigned to her status as the movie’s second most important prop.

All in all, the movie’s predictability and unwillingness to go any deeper than the surface of any of its questions doesn’t really take away from the fact that this is a solid, if unspectacular, action piece. Both major shootouts, in the town and at that lonely house, are very well-constructed. Action movie rules are disobeyed in both, which is nice, and the conclusion is not a hailstorm of bullets, which is different. Everything looks bleak and sunburned, yet somehow obviously purposed–an amusement park version of The Road. The performances, particularly Washington’s, Oldman’s, and Tom Waits’ (the engineer who charges Eli’s iPod) are fine, if not particularly nuanced. The problem is that the Hughes Brothers have no sense of pacing and decide that they don’t actually need a proper resolution.

The film actually takes great pains in letting you know that, in the end, nothing was really at stake beyond Carnagie’s pride—he and his crew of generic henchmen could have expanded their franchise of Rock Ridges without the good book—which means that things just kind of happen without cause. The movie goes on without a center, picking up hitchhiking plot elements without intending to properly resolve any of them. And when Solara wanders out on her own with Eli’s iPod and machete, I can’t tell if it’s sequel bait or the screenwriter forgetting that she was utterly useless unless something she had to say was absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And it all goes by so fast! Since when can’t we stop and appreciate the apocalypse?

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The Book of Eli. Directed by The Hughes Brothers. With Denzel Washington (Eli), Gary Oldman (Carnegie), Mila Kunis (Solara), Ray Stevenson (Redridge), Jennifer Beals (Claudia), Tom Waits (Engineer), and Michael Gambon (George). Released January 15, 2010, by Warner Bros.