Thanks, I Hate It: Black Swan

Yes, flat affect is a common symptom of psychosis. No, neither actress Natalie Portman nor director Darren Aronofsky manages to make it interesting to watch. Maybe it's the deeply square nature of her character's descent into madness, which includes a scene in which her going down on Mila Kunis is shot like some kind of lurid PSA against opium den orgies. Maybe it's Portman, who's only been good a handful of times. Whatever the answer, it comes together in a pervasive aura of dead-eyed anxiety that paves over the whole of Black Swan into a level surface only slightly more interesting than actual tar.

Aronofsky's movies have always felt to me like art informed by disgust, something I feel passionately about, but the things which disgust him also elude him. The decaying bodies of women who have pushed themselves to the edge, men who use art as a hunting ground in which to stalk and control vulnerable women, overbearing and abusive mothers --  it's thematically rich and interesting stuff, but Aronofsky's insight into these things feels limited to an instinctive flinching away. Some of the film's more fanciful body horror is beautiful to look at, but it never feels like something Portman's character would imagine. It never feels like a individual's experience.

Clint Mansell's score is likewise impersonal, a far cry from his mournfully intimate work on The Fountain, Aronofsky's sole good film. For a movie about the ruinous consequences of pursuing perfection, Black Swan has no innards and no ugliness, no contrast but flatness and deadness to the punishing ideal which consumes its heroine. Its few glimpses of hallucinatory monstrosity are hamstrung by Portman's unconvincing reactions and shallow characterization, images manifested in a vacuum and held out of focus in favor of an emotionally blank protagonist. Nor is the film's rendition of Swan Lake filmed or choreographed with much flair, reducing its biggest set piece to a kind of paint by numbers ballet scene in which the character concentrates very hard on doing something which looks  more or less robotic.

Aronofsky's prissy, colorless direction is at odds with his subject matter, his skittishness or ignorance about feminine violence and self-loathing harshly limiting to the film's depth. There's just something pedestrian in its makeup which it never manages to outrun, something that seems more like a rich guy's idle musings on what it's like to be a severely mentally ill woman than any kind of attempt at real sympathetic experience in the sense of feeling another person's suffering. Black Swan is tame and overly reserved, a movie about lunacy which never gets more terrifying than, say, running a stressful errand.