Not-so-happy feet

Vader lures Portman to the dark side—oh, wait....

Aronofsky uses a similar formula in Black Swan, his new film that opens Friday, Dec. 10, and is set in the world of ballet. But unlike The Wrestler, he’s got a bigger budget and a much bigger star in Natalie Portman. She’s always been well-respected, certainly, and, five years ago, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Close. But Portman has never had a role quite this meaty, and she gives herself over to it, body and soul.

She plays Nina Sayers, a New York ballerina who’s meek, lovely, talented and generous—and absolutely, utterly repressed, having lived her life in an apartment with her fawning, overprotective mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her own dancing career when Nina came along. She’s always gotten by on her talent because she doesn’t have the sort of self-esteem that allows her to play the politics of the industry.

And there are politics. The company’s artistic director, Leroy (Vincent Cassell), is forcing out Beth (Winona Ryder), his onetime star, and when he announces a new production of Swan Lake, which will feature one dancer as both the White Swan and the Black Swan, he suggests to Nina that she might have a better shot at landing the part if she did some private dancing—wink wink, nudge nudge. To top it off, there’s a new dancer in the company, Lily (Mila Kunis), who’s everything that Nina isn’t. She’s fun. She’s sexy. She’s sassy. And she may be working behind the scenes to steal Nina’s role.

Or is all of that in Nina’s mind? It’s not a spoiler to tell you that she does land the role, because Black Swan is really about what she goes through as she tries to tap into the part—or parts, as it were. Nina has everything about the White Swan in her makeup, in her innocence and her naiveté. The question is whether she’ll actually be able to find her inner Black Swan, the seductive charmer who steals the prince and leaves the White Swan with no alternative but to take her own life.

It’s that dichotomy that’s playing out in Nina throughout the film as she tries to touch (literally, in some cases) the dark, sexual side of herself. Her quest for perfection is enough to drive a poor girl crazy, and the results are chilling, bloody, gory and beautiful. That’s right: beautiful.

That’s what makes Black Swan such a success. Aronofsky’s film is more a psychological thriller than a drama, and it has more than its share of the grotesque and the graphic. The director takes moments of spring awakening that should be lovely and turns them the other way. Anyone who’s ever placed Natalie Portman on a sexual pedestal may rethink that position. When Nina, um, discovers herself or gets frisky with Lily, the mood is seethingly sexual without being sexy.

But where The Wrestler was rough, Black Swan is graceful and elegant. The dancing and the world the dancers inhabit is detailed and gorgeous. It’s a film that puts the camera in the middle of the dance, capturing both the art of ballet and the madness Nina delves into. At times you don’t know what’s actually happening versus what she thinks is happening, and that’s one of the film’s strengths, as well—Nina is her own unreliable narrator. But Aronofsky’s inspiration is the ballet itself, and the idea that even though we each have light and dark sides, perhaps we shouldn’t look too closely at either.

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