Black Swan R
Darren Arnofsky directs this dark, brooding rendition of a Swan Lake opera company, starring Natalie Portman as a mentally obsessed and tearful ballerina who longs to play the White Swan, but abruptly gets to play her evil double, the Black Swan, in an entertaining way. Portman plays an actually extremely neurotic person, far more so than the ones in 'Shutter Island' or 'A Beautiful Mind', but not in an uplifting way. Her good side is similar to her role as Amidala and as the girl who gets her head shaved in V for Vendetta. But she plays this as though Sophia Coppola and Christina Ricci are giving her directions. (They're not in it). She has a rivalry with another dancer for the part of the evil swan. Her mother is batty crazy also, and she has a scratching disorder to boot. Clearly if she was a real dancer, the company would have noticed how schizophrenic she was and have not let her perform. But given that, it is a dark psycho drama, not a thriller so much. Really her performance was quite good and there are no 2010 contenders for Oscar for a female lead, so she will likely win it. Technically though it came out in wide release just after 2010, Maybe she can just hallucinate winning the Oscar and come up to claim her statue. Whee! This proving she deserves it even more than Russell Crowe years ago. In fact, she did a better performance of the condition than Russel Crowe did in 'Mind'. And take note, the sexual aspects are part of the character's psyche.
Review by Adam Browne
Natalie Portman won, and she should have. :)
ReplyDeleteAgreed: It was a much better performance than Crowe's in that other movie, 'Beautiful Mind'. More realistic because instead of it being almost loopy that he's nuts, she's clearly scary nuts.
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