5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund
I really didn't give “Black Swan” a fair shake. The first time I saw it, back in October when it opened the Philadelphia Film Festival, my damned undue expectations had me squirming every time I didn't get a class-A, cosmopolitan ballet thriller: Why is Winona Ryder all but breaking her teeth on the scenery as a drunken, past-her-prime cliché? Why is Mila Kunis spouting the lame-brained innuendos of a straight-to-DVD teen flick? And why the hell is the stunted, fractured mental state of Natalie Portman's prima ballerina reaching dizzy extremes so absurd that one can't help but laugh? Shame on me for trying to box this movie in. A little more time with it reveals: that scenery was meant to be chewed, that dialogue doesn't want to be any better than it is, and that absurdity couldn't be more throat-grabbingly effective. “Black Swan” is as much a lurid potboiler as it is an intensely sophisticated psychodrama. It's a probing character study, a window into an insular world, a twisted tale of sexual discovery, a perverse comedy and a mad nightmare of manifested fears. There's really no way in which it doesn't succeed.
1 comment:
From beginning to end this movie is very pleasing. It is not a perfect film but is closer to perfection.
Black Swan
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