Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky has had an extremely interesting, if somewhat limited, career. He started out with the ultra-low budget PI, which got the attention of the indie film world. He followed that up with the devastating Requiem For A Dream, which garnered him critical acclaim and made the world take notice. He took years to come back with his personal pet project, The Fountain, which, while an interesting idea, couldn't stand up to his previous efforts. He came back with The Wrestler, which proved to also be a come back for its star, Mickey Rourke, and now brings us his fifth feature in 12 years, Black Swan.

Black Swan stars Natalie Portman as perfectionist ballerina, Nina. When the senior dancer of the company, played by Winona Ryder, is forced into retirement, the leader of the company, Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel) chooses Nina to be the lead in his production of The Black Swan. As Leroy challenges Nina during the rehearsal process, he brings on Lily (played by Mila Kunis), as an alternate who shakes up Nina's life. As the rehearsal process for the ballet continues, Nina's world begins to fall apart and she has a more difficult time separating reality from fiction.

Black Swan is hard to nail down. I liked the last twenty to thirty minutes of it, but the first two thirds of the film felt like a hard mess. Pretty much all of the main characters are extremely one dimensional, to a point where you get bored with them, and the only thing that keeps all of it going is the fantasies that Nina keeps having. Aranofsky borrows a lot of technique that he established in The Wrestler, but he used it to better result in that movie. The handheld cinematography doesn't work as well for this film. The neutral color pallet, though, was something that I did like. Aranofsky sticks, basically, to three colors throughout the film - white, black, and grey. There are other colors that show up every once in a while, but those three are the primary ingredients.

Ultimately, Black Swan feels like a film that can't decide what it wants to be. Is it trying to be a horror film or an intense psychological thriller? I think it spends way too much time trying to be both. What is real and what isn't? Normally, that question would be what makes for an interesting time, but in this film, it just makes things confusing and difficult to watch.

I wish I could speak better of the film, considering that I think that Aranofsky is one of our greatest directors, but I feel like Black Swan is trying to do to many different things, and not doing a great job at any of them.

Brothers

I was a little weary of this film when I first saw the posters popping up around L.A. I like Natalie Portman. I'll watch pretty much anything she's in. I don't like Tobey Maguire. The only things I've ever REMOTELY liked him in was The Ice Storm. There's the fact that its directed by Jim Sheridan, who I like, so that was a plus, but then there's Jake Gyllenhaal. No offense, but Jake hasn't done much that was worth while since Donnie Darko.

The film concerns the capture, and presumed death of Captain Sam Cahill (Maguire) while he's in Iraq. The Army assumes his death, and reports it to his wife, Grace (Portman), who ends up telling his Father, Step Mother, and brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal). Feeling guilty about being a screw up, while his brother bravely served his country, Tommy tries to make up for his feelings by helping out Grace in anyway that he can. In doing so, over time, Tommy and Grace begin to develop some rudimentary feelings for each other, which culminates in a case after they've smoked pot together. Before they can take it any further, though, Sam is rescued from his Iraqi prison and shipped back home. But the weeks of mental torture he suffered at the hands of his captors has left him fragile and angry.

Brother's is a remake of a foreign film, but Sheridan has managed to make it so incredibly American, that there isn't the faintest sense of its true origin. Maybe that's the strength and universality of the story, though. Tobey Maguire finally delivers a performance that's worth all of the hype that he's gotten over the years, and Portman is perfectly solid, as well as Gyllenhaal. The film feels like so much of what middle America is in this moment, and I think that is a huge compliment to Sheridan - That he has captured this moment, in both time and place, and captured the madness that war incites in everyone that has been touched by it. Brothers was intense, and furious, and engaging. A great film.