The film started a bit slowly as you get to know a bit about Nina. She lives in a childlike atmosphere with an overbearing mother who tries to trap her in the world of her youth as she relives her past through her daughter.
Nina does little to escape from this world and allows her mother to keep her there as she has never known anything else. This is why she makes such a good white swan as she has basically kept herself pure and naive.
However for the part of the black swan needed to combine with the white swan to make the Swan Queen, she needs to find a darker side of herself. The virginal perfectionist, must give way to the raw, flawed, sensual side that she has never known, to truly encapsulate the role.
In order to do this, her mind begins to play tricks on her, to show her the evil, the twisted, and the sexual that she needs. She reels from this and tries to fight it and flee at any possible chance.
The closer she gets to the first performance the farther from reality she goes. You begin to lose track of what is real and what is imagined in every action. Her trip down the dark path vastly increases her ability to perform as the black swan, however, her grasp on reality continues to slip away.
The performance itself is a bit shaky early on as she has slipped so far away from who she was that she can no longer completely embody the white swan. Her fall during a lift symbolizes her fall from grace and occurs at a point in the performance where she can begin to morph into the black swan.
She is a wreck after her fall, but her mind uses this opportunity to throw one heck of a mind trip her way that allows her to slip fully into the role that nobody thought she had in her. Her performance as the black swan is as chilling as it is intense. However, have the lengths that she has gone to in order to perform such a feat forced her so far down the road to insanity that she will never return.
The Black Swan was a very good film that picked up on a fragile, unstable girl, brings you through familial and sexual revolutions and drops you into the middle of madness.
Natalie Portman was amazing as Nina. The movie rests solely on her shoulders and she carries it throughout. That is not to say that others did not step up as well. Mila Kunis was fun and carefree in her role as Lily, Nina's possible competition. Barbara Hershey was intense and overbearing as Nina's mother Erica who gave up her career as a dancer when she became pregnant with Nina. The relationship between the two is chaotic and at times a bit surreal, but the bond seemed real and you could see the same intensity in Portman as the Black Swan as you see from Hershey as her mother.
The Black Swan was a great film to start my Awards Season marathon and I will be surprised if I see many that are better. I would be shocked if Portman isn't nominated many times for awards this season and wins at least a few. The performance by Portman as the Black Swan is amazing and worth the price of admission alone. Her metamorphosis is stunning. With the raw power of her performance along with the visual effects and sound, I was blown away. I give Black Swan a 9.
