Black Swan (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release....

"The Red Shoes Diaries"
or
"Losing Control (She-Bop, Sh'Bop, Sh'Bop)"

Black Swan is a head-trip, alright. Darren Aronofsky's latest of his films exploring the limits of obsession—the pursuit of it, the need for it, and its cost—never travels too far afield from the whirling dermis-dome of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman—brave). A "girly-girl" to the nth degree, Nina still lives with Mom (Barbara Hershey—even braver) in a 12 year old's bedroom, blushes in embarrassment when sex is brought up, and still pursues the girl's version of what the Bible calls "childish things"—prima ballerina.

And like the dervishes who spin to achieve some form of religious ecstasy, she is looking for an epiphany in her pursuit of perfection. Be careful what you wish for.

From the loges, it all looks so elegant, but on stage it's a board-thumping, sinew-stretching, bone-popping athletic performance, practiced to such an extent to be made to seem easy.  The body takes a beating.  Callouses form, bones snap, nails bear the brunt of the quest for perfection.  It's beautiful but brutal. And, as any athlete will tell you, it's as much a challenge of the mind, as well. There's the discipline to do the job unerringly, but there's also physical acting, as well. Synapses fire to work the muscles, but those same synapses are under assault psychologically, fraying from the pressures on-stage and backstage.

For Nina, it's an obsession for perfection.* Her director (Vincent Cassel) knows she can nail the star-part of the pure white swan in "Swan Lake," but the vixenish back swan is more of a challenge. "Perfection isn't about control.  It's also about letting go." For the more sensuous black swan, Nina is at a loss, so bottled up in being perfect, she's afraid to open up from the discipline. "Live a little," he suggests, telling her to touch herself.

As if there isn't enough self-abuse going on.

The pressures start getting to her. Given to obsessively scratching her shoulder, she develops a rash at her shoulder blades. Toe-nails split. Her fingernails turn bloody (at one point she tears off a length of finger skin down to the second knuckle). She seems to be coming apart at the seams, and if she can't bear up, she'll be replaced like the departing prima Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder**).  The number one candidate for the job is Lily (Mila Kunis), an earthy dancer from San Francisco, who typifies the black swan, and who becomes something of a paranoid obsession to Nina from their first glance. By the time Nina actually pulls the bud of a black feather out of her scraped-raw shoulder, it's pretty apparent Nina has crossed a line and, like an exquisite ballet, fantasy has disguised reality.

It's scary, almost a horror film. Aronofsky keeps the film taught, his restless camera taking a position directly behind Nina's head, clod-hopping behind her, seeing what she sees, agitatedly cutting out the dull parts. Then it spins as she does, picking out the neck-snapping details that Nina sees in the blur. Fully a quarter of the film involves a reflective surface (even a shot of Nina looking at her mother's obsessive portraits of her—of course, Mom is trying to "get" daughter perfect, too), even if those mirrors don't always behave well.

And, as he did with The Fountain, Aronofsky proves himself a master of subtle sound-work, using extreme fields to further enhance the disorientation the audience feels inside Nina's head (more than once, I looked to see if there was someone behind me in the theater), and altering reality—making a toe-nail clipper sound like a guillotine, making you feel the gristle of toe-bones as they snap.

And he gets the best out of Portman.  It's a technically tough performance—she's in every scene, and her face, typically beautiful in serenity, is constricted in constant struggle, disrupting the planes of her face into a worried mask that seldom shows her at her best, veering into moments of hysteria.

For the sacrifice of art, she's not pretty, nor is the film, despite its subject matter and occasional forays into the dance-fantasy. How can it be? We're not sitting comfortably in the audience, but perched precariously in Nina's whirling head, dizzy with the spin, that even braking to a screeching stop, continues the momentum in our own minds long afterwards

* I don't want to get too far into this, although I'm sure Aronofsky and his scripters (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin) probably did. There's something called the "Black Swan Theory," about large, unexpected events and their shock-wave effect on human psyches that must come to grips with it. What's most relevant about it are the ten principles the theory's author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, concocts to create a more predictable world: 

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become Too Big to Fail.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence".
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Hmmm.  Some of this relates. 
  
** A glance at the four lead actresses, Portman, Ryder, Kunis, Hershey, and most of the supporting ballerinas reveals that they are all similar-looking women—a long line of raven-haired ingenues, like their own organic mirror images.

A Dangerous Method

It's October..."so maybe I should pay attention to horror films." How cliché.

I have some planned and in the hopper, but I noticed "The Large Association of Movie Blogs" is showcasing director David Cronenberg, so I'm also going to be throwing in a bunch of Cronenberg reviews from the past and the retrospective present. After all, you can't have a Cronenberg movie without a little bit of horror...somewhere.

Written at the time of the film's release.

Physician, Heal Thyself
or
"It's Hard, You Will Find, to be Narrow of Mind When You're Jung at Heart"

There's a lovely scene in Francis Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream, in which Tucker's accountant (played by Martin Landau) talks about how his mother "in the old country" warned him not to get too close to people or he'd catch their "dreams." "Years later," he says "I realized I misunderstood her. 'Germs', she said, not dreams, you'll catch their germs."

David Cronenberg's film of A Dangerous Method (adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play), a fictionalization of the relationship between psychiatric pioneers Signmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, might well have "don't get too close to people or you'll catch their dreams" as its tagline.  Starting out, Jung and Freud are two eminent theoretical psychiatrists, the former in Switzerland and the latter in Vienna. Spielrein is admitted to Jung's care, suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia, but he is convinced that Freud's "talking cure" (the name of Hampton's play) might lead to a break-through from her confusion and agitation.

Jung (Michael Fassbender) has it all going for him—in marked contrast to his troubled patients and his contemporaries in his field—married to a rich heiress, he works because he wants to, not because he has to. Humorless, cool and entirely self-absorbed and -satisfied, the treatment of Spielrein gives him a very real sense of accomplishment, as the woman's obvious intelligence allows her to improve from the agitated state she arrives in.*  His comradeship with Freud (Viggo Mortensen, his third film in a row with director Cronenberg) starts intellectually, evolves into an affectionate father-son mentorship, Freud sees him as an "heir" in the field of psychotherapy, and encourages his younger contemporary and his processes...up to a point—Freud cooly informs Jung, while he's is visiting the home of the elder, that, sure, he can espouse his sexual theories at the Freud family dinner table—after all, "they've heard worse."  But the air of chastisement is never far from Freud's sphere, like the smoke that hangs around his cigar.

Jung is a confident, if clueless, intellectual and emotionally remote (although he would use the word "dispassionate").  Things start to go downhill when Freud sends him "a problem" professor, Otto Gross (a nearly unrecognizable Vincent Cassel), a libertine without conscience or consequences, who starts to influence Jung to his way of thinking. The pressures of Gross' philosophy (such as it is) and Spielrein's needy attempts at seduction, compels him to begin, eventually, a twisted affair with his patient, the result of which leads to whispers of impropriety in psychiatric circles and creates a rift between him and Freud.

Jung reacts, not by questioning his own actions, but escalating his objections to Freud's obsession with sex as the root of human dysfunction,** and as good as he is at examining others, is incapable of realizing the deadening of his own emotions and darkening of his tone.  His own self-analysis becomes paralyzed in the conflicts of his own mind, and he's left confused, disillusioned and impotent to know how to bring himself out of it. The patient improves and becomes a more rounded human being, but the doctor...he succumbs.  

It recalls words the simple answer my brother used when I was contemplating psychotherapy: "But...psychiatrists are crazy!" 

And why wouldn't they be? In tending to our needs, they are just as likely to catch our dream and ensnare our nightmares...and be ensnared by them.  Everything is communicable.

And the stories of Spielrein, Jung and Freud, running parallel but opposite paths of mental health, exemplify the rising and falling fortunes, not of career and accomplishment, but of personal integrity. A Dangerous Method is a furthering of the film argument (which is found throughout the work of Kubrick and Welles, for instance) that intellect does not matter so much in a person's measure as character.

* A passing comment on Keira Knightley's performance, which is, initially, truly alarming, one of the great "crazy" acts since Helena Bonham Carter's Ophelia in Zefferelli's version of Hamlet, but then Knightley has never been afraid of a performance that will risk her beauty.  Here, she is vigorously spastic, mercurial, contorting her face into ape-like grimaces and flashes of madness, the eyes pin-wheeling around the room in search of...anything that might pull her out of her own head.  Yes, it's over-the-top, but compare it to the woman she becomes by the end—for the triad of performances and personalities in the film, her story is the focus, the lynch-pin around which the film revolves—very properly, as those early years of the "talk treatment" are dominated, probably unfairly, but historically accurately, by the reputations of the father-figures in the field.  Girls Not Allowed.

** This is certainly true in the portrayal of Freud here; if you ask Morgenson's Freud how many psychiatrists it would take to change a light-bulb (Answer: Just one, but it has to really want to change), he'd coolly appraise you, contemplate his cigar and ask aloud why you chose to not use the word "screw."  Avoidance, maybe?  Um...