Culturebox: Nutcracked

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movies Nutcracked Natalie Portman as an unstable dancer in the inert Black Swan. By Dana Stevens Posted Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010, at 7:57 PM ET One thing you can say about Darren Aronofsky: You never know what he's going to do next. A through-line connecting his movies to one another would read like a 2008 stock-market graph. There was Pi, a grainy black-and-white thriller about a Jewish math prodigy; then Requiem for a Dream, a hyper-stylized melodrama about drug addicts in New York City; then The Fountain, a grandiose metaphysical nut-out with a time-traveling Hugh Jackman in pursuit of the fountain of youth; and then The Wrestler, a gritty realist tale about the redemption of a burned-out athlete. That Aronofsky's next project would be a psychological horror movie about a disturbed ballerina seemed no more or less logical than the notion that he'd adapt Bleak House as a 3-D musical. The Wrestler is the only one of Aronofsky's films I've really liked, but I approach each new one with fresh excitement: Though his movies can be risibly off-kilter, Aronofsky is a filmmaker of ambition, energy, and scope--a guy whose reach has a way of thrillingly exceeding his grasp. The reach/grasp ratio is way off in Black Swan (Fox Searchlight), a movie that combines some truly stunning visual and cinematic ideas with some truly terrible, well, ideas. Yet the conceit at its heart is not unpromising. Like the uber-ballet movie of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Black Swan is a dark fairy tale about a ballerina who risks being destroyed by an all-consuming role. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a dancer in the corps of a company that's never quite named as the New York City Ballet. The company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), a sadistic womanizer who's clearly meant to recall NYCB founder George Balanchine, is casting a production of Swan Lake that will apparently reinvent the Tchaikovsky chestnut from the ground up. (How it will do that, we're never told. Though Aronofsky fetishizes tulle tutus and close-ups of bleeding feet, he seems remarkably uninterested in actual dancing, and what choreography we do see looks pretty conventional.) To continue reading, click here. Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. E-mail her at slatemovies@gmail.com. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Do Free-Trade Agreements Actually Boost American Exports? Black Swan Is Ambitious, Visually Stunning, and Pretty Terrible Did You Really Think the Corrupt Pill Bugs at FIFA Would Give the World Cup to the United States?	Advertisement
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