Metamorphoses

BLACK SWAN

As the screen completed its slow fade to white, and the words "Directed by Darren Aronofsky" appeared to start the closing credits, I was breathless, my mouth agape, my eyes as big as saucers, my heart racing. The previous hundred ten minutes—and particularly the last twenty or so—had been one of the most thrilling, moving, transcendent experiences I'd ever had watching a film. After having seen thousands of films in my life, I found myself astounded anew at what this medium is capable of achieving.

(And I'm not just talking about Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis's "scene together." Though that was certainly memorable in its own right.)

Black Swan (trailer) is the story of Nina (Portman), a talented ballerina in a New York ballet company, whose greatness is impaired by an almost childlike meekness and inexperience. However, the company's director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), sees potential—and perhaps something else as well—in her, and chooses her for the lead in Swan Lake, requiring her to play both the pure, innocent heroine and her dark, seductive doppelgänger, the "black swan." The tremendous physical, mental, and artistic pressures that the role imposes as she prepares are compounded by the people around her: her encouraging but dominating and manipulative mother (Barbara Hershey), a ballerina herself before Nina's unexpected birth required her to give up her career; the retiring prima ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder), bitter over her seemingly premature sunset and the way the company—and Thomas in particular—used and then discarded her; and above all Lily (Kunis), a new arrival to the company whose uninhibited and passionate nature is exactly what Nina's "black swan" lacks, possibly both the key to getting Nina out of her artistic and personal shell and a ruthless rival trying to sabotage her big break. The strain of all this on the already fragile Nina takes a growing toll on her psyche, dragging her into paranoia, hallucination, and self-destruction.

Aronofsky's execution of this is fantastic. Portman's stunning performance is the best of her career. Her Nina begins seemingly in control, but only because never before seriously challenged; under her role's demands and Lily's influence, her brittleness becomes more and more apparent and threatens to shatter instead of strengthen her. (The role is funny because, like Nina, it is often said of Portman that, while very talented and attractive, she comes off as too sweet, delicate, and innocent to be really sexy, like a modern-day Audrey Hepburn. She's said that one reason she took the role was to try to shed some of that sweet-little-girl image and to be seen as more of a serious, adult actress.) Though pulling Nina in opposite directions, Kunis (whose performance won her the Mastroianni Award at Venice) and Hershey both nail the ambiguity their respective characters require, offering Nina comfort (in the latter's case) or liberation (in the former's) one minute and smilingly threatening her the next. Cassel has turned out to be one of my favorite actors this year, coming off his revelatory (to me, anyway) lead performance in the two-part crime-epic biopic Mesrine (trailer); here he not so much straddles the line between demanding mentor and exploitative scumbag as embraces both aspects of his character, accepting and exploring how they complement each other.

In addition to the cast, another aspect that stands out is the sound, and I don't just mean the Tchaikovsky. The incredibly demanding physicality of ballet is conveyed compellingly with the sounds of toes grinding on the floor like dull drills and clothes stretching and compressing as the dancers contort. Given that all this is usually drowned out by music during performances, actually hearing it during practice and rehearsals—no doubt accentuated for cinematic effect—gives an understanding of the great physical strain their bodies experience, while making visible and audible Nina's own psychological strain.

And speaking of physicality, Black Swan features enough cringe-inducing body horror to make Cronenberg proud. Not just the more fantastical transformations that Nina undergoes (of which the trailer offers a glimpse), but also the bodily damage resulting from the physical rigors of ballet and Nina's own increasingly high-strung nature: accidents from cutting finger- and toe-nails with scissors (which makes me uncomfortable regardless of the context), toe-nails breaking from pressure, nervous scratching and pulling at the skin around finger-nails. Though sometimes taken to gruesome extremes, this damage obviously results in far less harm or blood than your average horror film or thriller, but watching it did far more to ratchet up my tension, discomfort, and anxiety than most stabbings, gun shots, or beatings could. Though we never see much blood or gore, this film is not for the squeamish.

Regardless of its many art-house elements, Black Swan is, by genre, a thriller, like Aronofsky's debut, Pi; but it hews much more closely to the common themes and tropes of that genre, making it a more "thrillerish" thriller. The threats to Nina, even the ones only in her mind, are much more concrete than intellectual obsession; she comes to fear that people and forces are actually threatening her career and herself. This is where my only real criticisms of the film lie. (No, despite what all the praise above might suggest, I didn't think it was perfect.) Its faithfulness to familiar thriller tropes makes certain plot elements rather predictable: Of course the talented newcomer is going to be a rival and a threat to our heroine; of course the fading star whom she's replacing is going to be bitter and vindictive; of course the lights are going to go out and some blurred shape is going to rush past the end of the hall accompanied by a sudden, discordant crash on the score. I can't help but think the film could've forgone some of these "bump in the dark" moments and just let the tension come from Nina's more natural fears and disorientation; but this is a minor complaint for a film that does such a good job building a sense of threat, uncertainty, and loss of control. (Needless to say, it's handily unseated Argento's Suspiria (trailer) as the premier ballet-themed thriller featuring supernatural elements.)

Besides the film's artistic qualities, it also featured some core themes I found intriguing as well. One—probably the principal theme—is the idea of artistic creation through self-destruction. In order to play the "black swan" part of her role convincingly, Nina realizes that she must discard a good deal of who she is, the young, shy, inexperienced "white swan" who lives with her mother and has a bedroom full of stuffed animals. To achieve what the role demands, this butterfly must break out of her cocoon; but the process turns out to be a dangerous one, over which she has very incomplete control. She eventually begins to see positive results as her "black swan" performance improves, but what'll be left of her by the end as she lets go of her old life is uncertain. Before her stands the example—as both object of admiration and cautionary tale—of her predecessor as prima ballerina, Beth, whose great artistic highs went hand in hand with devastating personal lows. How far down Beth's road Nina will need to go is both a core element of the film's drama and a challenging question it poses about the creative process in general.

Another theme is that of the unreliable narrator. Though Nina doesn't literally narrate, we see the entire film through her eyes (I don't think there's a single scene without her), including her apparent hallucinations as her psyche breaks down. The subjectivity and unreliability of what we see is an obvious outcome of her psychological instability, but Aronofsky plays with this in interesting ways. For instance, Nina's hallucinations don't steadily become more dramatic and obvious; instead, obvious hallucinations are followed by events that seem plausible but on which doubt is later cast. ——— SPOILERS ——— For instance, obvious hallucinations like Nina's seeing her own face on a stranger, her mother's paintings screaming at her, and her growing wings during her "black swan" performance are interspersed with events like her sleeping with Lily, Beth's stabbing herself with her nail file, and Nina's killing Lily, which seem very real at the time but are later shown to be impossible or at least ambiguous. (Lily denies sleeping with Nina; Nina finds Beth's bloody nail file in her own hand after running away; and Lily turns up alive and well after Nina supposedly killed her.) ——— END SPOILERS ——— As a result, we begin to doubt (at least on first viewing) whether anything we're seeing, however plausible, is really happening or is merely in Nina's increasingly deranged mind.

Wow. There's so much more I could go on about: the captivating opening scene; Clint Mansell's haunting, operatic score; the grainy, heldheld-style photography (very like The Wrestler's) and its interesting contrast with the classical score and fantastical imagery; the camera's balletic movements around the actors. But I think I've written enough for now, to get my thoughts down while the experience is still fresh. Though not perfect—I'd have to rank it a little below The Fountain in Aronofsky's filmography, if only because a gorgeous time-skipping love story is a lot more pleasant to watch than Natalie Portman pulling at her cuticle until she tears it halfway down her finger—Black Swan is a gripping, intense, expertly crafted experience throughout, and in its conclusion rises to a beautiful, exhilirating euphoria rarely achieved by even the best. Perhaps it's just a matter of Aronofsky again shamelessly taking advantage of my well known weakness for pretty and emotive movies; even if so, he's done cinema a service in the process, and I couldn't be more grateful for it. You've triumphed again, Mr. Aronofsky.

P.S. — "I was perfect" is this year's "I think this just might be my masterpiece." Discuss amongst yourselves.

From the Moon to the Earth

The trailer of Source Code, the next film by the terrific director, Ziggy Stardust progeny, and friend of the blog Duncan Jones, is now available. Though he's moved to slightly more terrestrial settings this time around, he's hardly eschewing the fantastical and heady concepts that Moon featured. The plot seems a good deal more action-and-suspence-oriented than his last film (though Moon was hardly lacking in tension, of course), but I have a hard time believing that those elements won't stay tied to the mind-bending concepts and moral dilemmas we've seen in his past work. As for the cast, Gyllenhaal has done some fantastic work over the past decade (Prince of Persia aside), from Donnie Darko to Brokeback Mountain to Zodiac, and I loved Monaghan in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Gone Baby Gone (in both playing a love interest who's more than just a love interest—which, incidentally, is the vibe I'm getting from her role in Source Code as well). Given that he got what I consider one of the best performances of his career out of Sam Rockwell for Moon, I've got no worries at all in that department. If the trailer's anything to go by, it looks like Jones is two for two in delivering films that make us think while keeping us on the edge of our seats.

Is Michael Caine the new Christopher Walken?

Maybe, because there seem to be celebrity impressions of him coming left and right. Here (courtesy of Devin Faraci's new gig, the Alamo Drafthouse's Badass Digest), Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon square off to see whose Michael Caine impression is Michael-Cainier. And here, Peter Serafinowicz (a.k.a. the guy Edgar Wright calls when he needs to fill an asshole-supporting-character role; see, e.g., his turns as "Duane," Tim's girlfriend-stealing ex-friend in Spaced, and "Pete," Shaun and Ed's "prick" roommate in Shaun of the Dead) does a pretty mean impression as well as part of his "Acting Masterclass" bit on The Peter Serafinowicz Show. (Of course, that isn't his only great impression there; his Kevin Spacey, Ralph Fiennes, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino are also spot-on. Regarding his Pacino, I'm impressed by anyone who goes for the Michael-Corleone-style quiet-Pacino over later-career loud-Pacino (the best of which is, of course, Bill Hader's—he's got some grief with his moolah!). So peruse those to your heart's content, gentle reader.) If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Michael Caine must have the most kissed ass in British entertainment.

The golden age of minimalist movie posters is now.

It'll probably take some squinting to appreciate them to the fullest, but this outfit called 37 Posters made, well, posters based on a simple but effective formula: Pick a beloved film or TV show, pick an iconic object from said film or TV show, and cover said object with iconic lines from said film or TV show. The results of their brilliance can be seen here. (And a shout-out to CHUD for informing me of this.)

From Slough to Bag End

Though we don't post a lot on film news, the Tolkien-nerd in me cries out that I give notice to the fact that several roles in The Hobbit have officially been cast. In addition to several Dwarves to be played by actors whose names I don't recognize (yet), Martin Freeman—Tim Canterbury (a.k.a. the "Jim" role) on the original Office, Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Dr. Watson on the BBC series Sherlock—has been cast as the title Halfling, the reluctant burglar, he that walks unseen, the ring-winner and luckwearer, Bilbo Baggins, Esquire. It's a choice that's been kicked around for years now, mostly because it's a very good one; Freeman is great at playing the everyman (especially the English kind), with a sense of being ordinary, compliant, and a bit put-upon, but with a potential for unexpected (seemingly uncharacteristic) courage when the need arises. The only other actor I can think of who might be equally good for the role is Tom Hollander, who starred in last year's excellent In the Loop. So Freeman's casting is some welcome, if not exactly shocking, news.

This is a production that's needed some good news for a while. Peter Jackson had been devoping it with Guillermo del Toro for some time, with the latter planning to direct it for MGM as two films—one covering the events of the novel itself (or at least most of it), and the other covering the six decades or so between that and Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday party with which The Lord of the Rings begins. But MGM's mounting financial problems (leading to the studio's upcoming bankruptcy) delayed work so long that del Toro left in May to pursue other projects. (While two del Toro Hobbit films was a tantalizing prospect, the fact that his next project will be his long-awaited adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness certainly makes his loss to Tolkiendom much easier to bear.) Though Jackson has now assumed the director's chair for both films, he has faced legal disputes over the rights with the Tolkien estate and New Line, the studio behind his Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as labor disputes with actors' unions that may force Jackson not to film in New Zealand.

Given that most of the news about the Hobbit adaptation has been negative for some time, the fact that it's apparently soldiering on regardless is encouraging and gives me hope that we may soon enjoy once again the wonder and spectacle that Jackson first brought us nine years ago.

P.S. — If Jackson has any sense, he'll find a way to incorporate this into the films. Forget Howard Shore; the main theme for the score is already written!

Everybody must get Stone(d)

PLATOON

First off, I should explain that while the words in quotation marks in the first paragraph of my last post were intended to quote what you'd said after we watched the film, I intended the quotation marks around "happy ending" in the third paragraph as scare-quotes, not (for lack of a better word) quotation-quotes. I guess I could've made that clearer. (Though in your last post you did write that the ending seemed to avoid "something that could be perceived to have a negative message"; maybe there's a difference between that and a "happy ending," but I'm honestly not seeing it.)

Secondly, I think our disagreement about the ending of Platoon stems from the fact that we simply see what the film is about somewhat differently. I agree that Taylor's "education," the various points that the film conveys about war can do to people, is an important element. But I think that to see that as the film's only purpose is to see it too narrowly. Platoon's not just about Taylor's learning the "moral of the story," so to speak—"the primal nature that can exist," "becoming what you loathe," "the experience of war can make any man a killer,"* etc.—but more about his Vietnam experiences as a whole and how they shaped his young life. It makes sense that Stone would look at it this way, since the events are partly based on (or at least inspired by) his own experiences in the war, with Taylor in many respects standing in for Stone himself (who came from an upper-middle-class family, dropped out of Yale, and enlisted at the age of twenty-one for combat duty in Vietnam). Taylor's more than just a character in a story whose role is to move the narrative along and illustrate certain issues, or at least that's how I imagine Stone saw him when he made the film. After all, nearly two decades of his life had already passed since Stone had served in Vietnam, so it would be natural for him to spend a minute or two reflecting on his fictional soldier's post-Vietnam life.

Taylor isn't a mere cipher to convey the film's lessons, to serve a narrative purpose and then disappear; he's a broader embodiment of the Vietnam experiences of Stone and veterans like him, experiences that they carried off the battlefield and that shaped their post-war lives. Those experiences included saying goodbye to friends, returning to "the world," mourning the dead, and reflecting on what it all meant and how one should move forward with the rest of one's life. So I think that Stone intended the film's ending as a nod to those aspects of veterans' lives—indeed, to his own life. As a matter of fact, I think that it makes the film more "fulfilling," giving it a broader scope and meaning, rather than encapsulating the events we've just seen with an abrupt ending on the battlefield. Just because it isn't The Deer Hunter or Born on the Fourth of July doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't touch on post-war life in addition to depicting combat. (And besides, I have a hard time seeing a film that depicts an American N.C.O. as a homicidal psychopath, and most of the rest as brutal, cruel, or indifferent, as making much of an effort to pander to veterans.)

And such themes, issues, and messages aside, I stand by my assertion that ending the film as soon as Taylor kills Barnes would have been less stylistically and tonally appropriate than ending it as it does, which eases the audience out and offers a chance for reflection.

I should mention that my support for the ending doesn't mean that I think Platoon is flawless in all respects. My main criticism would be that it doesn't really convey Taylor's claim during the epilogic voice-over that he was "born of those two fathers," Sgts. Barnes and Elias, that they were "fighting for possession of his soul." Other than that line and an earlier one (in the scene when Taylor attacks Barnes in the tent) when Rhah reminds Taylor that he (Taylor) used to admire Barnes, he seems to be entirely on Elias's side throughout the film and disgusted with Barnes. Maybe there are cut scenes of Taylor looking up to or identifying with Barnes, I don't know, but in the cut we watched those two lines seem really out of place, obliquely hinting at an aspect of the film that we never actually see.

* On that point, we should remember that Sgt. Elias had been in Vietnam for three years and was an excellent soldier, but never lost his decency or humanity. So the moral deterioration that Stone generally depicts among the characters as a result of their war experiences isn't really universal or inevitable.

Casting the second (post on) Stone

In your recent post about my somewhat offhand comments about Platoon, I think you may have put words in my mouth a little bit. As a student of journalism I should scold you for putting quotes around words I never said. Who do you think you are, Aaron Sorkin?

Spoiler alert as well here folks, which should be obvious since this is a response to another spoiler-heavy post. But I imagine one can never be too safe about preventing the spoiling of a 24-year-old movie.

My feeling was not that the movie had a "happy ending" by any stretch of the imagination -- Taylor is shown clutching a grenade and contemplating suicide and then we watch helicopters en route to military hospitals depart from land being made into mass graves. My quibble was with what I called a sentimental ending. The only purpose that the last few minutes served to me was to show how Taylor had a lot of emotion on leaving Vietnam and it did not seem that was what the movie was about prior to that ending. I saw the movie as following Taylor's education as a man and discovering through war the primal nature that can exist. That scene with Barnes was so powerful because it was the end of his education: He does exactly what he loathed about the sergeant and discovered that no matter how much he thought he was better than Barnes, at heart the experience of war can make any man a killer. It was a powerful movie about how a man loses enough of himself to become a warrior, not how a man becomes sorrowful about war. What it came across as was Stone felt he had to make an ending that was a bit of a tribute to veterans more so than a fulfilling part of the movie.

The slightly half-baked idea I mentioned at the end of the movie may not have been exactly how the film should have ended. It did not need to be a Sopranos style closing. But I stand by my observation that Stone would have made a stronger finish had he made that scene the final one. Instead that last moments had the smell of something a studio usually tacks on to make a particular group (veterans in this case -- not that I think it was anti-veteran but that's a whole different subject) or Academy voters who do not like to see something that could be perceived to have a negative message.

Oliver's stones

PLATOON

— THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR IS SPOILERS. —

Matt, after watching Platoon a couple nights ago, you said that you didn't like how Oliver Stone ended the film; specifically, you said that the fact that we see Taylor (Charlie Sheen) being evacuated from the battlefield and saying goodbye to some of the survivors from his unit meant that Stone didn't have any "stones" (in the parlance of our times), and that film would have been much more "effective" if it had ended with Taylor shooting Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger). I disagreed at the time, but hadn't had the chance really to articulate why (beyond the fact that we wouldn't have gotten that great final epilogic voice-over). Now that I've had the chance to think about it a little, I'd like to explain why I think the right ending for Platoon is the ending it has.

Platoon is told in a realistic style, and its tone is reflective and mournful. You see this in its straightforward structure and visual style, in the voice-overs, and in the score. That being the case, it makes sense to follow Taylor off the battlefield, into the beginning of his post-Vietnam life, as he reflects on what the experiences we've just witnessed meant to him, easing the audience out of the film. Ending it with a sudden cut to black (or something like that) after he shoots Barnes would have been completely out of place in terms of the tone the film had established. Something like that would have been more fitting for a film like Natural Born Killers, with its much more stylized . . . well, style, and its shocking and aggressive tone. Ending the film that way would have had a jarring effect that the rest of the film just wasn't going for. (Of course, a lot of the events depicted are shocking and jarring, for instance Barnes's shooting of the Vietnamese woman, but the way they're depicted is not, in terms of editing and photography.) It would be much more in keeping with what would become Stone's signature visual and editing style in later films of his like The Doors, JFK, and the aforementioned Natural Born Killers, or with Kubrick's nearly contemporaneous Full Metal Jacket, which, from its opening shots of conscripts having their heads shaven to the strains of "Hello Vietnam," informs the audience of its more over-the-top and satirical tone. Ending Platoon as he did was perfectly in keeping with the seriousness and realism that Stone had spent the prior two hours establishing, and so was quite effective.

I certainly don't see the ending as a sign of Stone's chickening out by giving the audience a more upbeat ending than the ending you suggested. First off, it's not really much of a "happy ending": Most of the unit is dead (either from the North Vietnamese or the napalm bombing), we see bulldozers pushing mounds of corpses into mass graves, and our protagonist weeps as the voice-over talks about how he carried the war's emotional scars for the rest of his life. Moreover, we don't need those final scenes to know that Taylor was probably going to make it off the battlefield: He was obviously wounded badly enough to be hospitalized, but not so badly that he would die before U.S. troops found him (as they almost certainly would, since they'd beaten off the North Vietnamese assault (however pyrrhically) and would then search the battlefield for survivors and collect the dead). Even if the film had ended as you suggested, it wouldn't have been any more or less a "happy ending," except for its jarring emotional effect, which, as I explained above, would have been inappropriate.

In any number of other films, the ending you suggested would have been great. But it would have been tonally and stylistically out of place in Platoon.

Requiescat in pace: Kon Satoshi, 1963-2010

I just found out that anime director Kon Satoshi (or Satoshi Kon, as he's known in the West) died on Tuesday, at the age of forty-six. The cause of death was a pancreatic cancer that was already late-stage when discovered in May.

I'm not really a fan of anime. Most of the examples I've seen seem more concerned with attaching flashy visuals to cardboard characters and absurdly convoluted plots than with actually engaging the audience on an emotional and/or intellectual level. Kon was one of the few counterexamples I found. His filmography is brief—the dark Hitchcockian thriller Perfect Blue, the touching drama Millennium Actress, the powerful and funny Tokyo Godfathers, the surreal fantasy Paprika, and the television series Paranoia Agent—but easily establishes him as a significant and masterful filmmaker. Generally eschewing the fantastic and the bizarre for their own sakes (the exception to this being Paprika, his only misstep among his films; I haven't seen Paranoia Agent), his films focused on real-world situations—a celebrity stalked by an obsessed fan, an elderly actress reminiscing on her life, a homeless trio finding an abandoned baby in the trash—and how they impacted relatively ordinary, realistic characters. Fantastic elements—for instance, the documentarians comically finding themselves included in Chiyoko's memories in Millennium Actress—were usually only included to support the story, not the other way around.

Kon's focus on story, character, and genuine emotion and drama set him apart from the vast majority of anime filmmakers. His animes weren't the only ones more interested in telling affecting stories than with showing off the most bizarre robot or mutant designs, but in my (admittedly rather limited) experience they're few and far between (Grave of the Fireflies, the films of Miyazaki Hayao). I own only one anime DVD that isn't a Miyazaki film or The Animatrix, and it's Tokyo Godfathers. Not Ninja Scroll, not Ghost in the Shell, not even Akira. As pieces of storytelling, Kon's films stand head and shoulders over the vast majority of the competition in the world of anime. It's a true shame that such a creatively fruitful career should end so soon. Kon's death is a loss to anime and to cinema as a whole.

— — — — —

Before his death, Kon wrote a farewell message, which can be found in translation here.

End of the Days of Devin

Though this blog has never been in the tertiary-source business of discussing film criticism and critics themselves (for fear of creating a Moebius strip of critical self-referentiality so profound and powerful as to risk tearing a hole in space-time itself), I believe it's worth making an exception in this case.

Devin Faraci, editor and chief contributor to CHUD, is leaving that site. It sounds like it's completely amicable—simply a matter of pursuing other opportunities elsewhere—but I have to admit that it's a bit shocking and disheartening. When Nick Nunziata founded CHUD about ten years ago, Devin was but a lowly poster on its message board; from there, he began contributing reviews and articles, then became a site editor, eventually writing a substantial portion of CHUD's content (for a while he wrote virtually every film review and at least half of the news stories), conducting film-set visits and interviews, and becoming CHUD's public face in such venues as G4's Attack of the Show. To a great extent, he has become the voice of CHUD—a site he's helped to make one of the best, if not the best, in online film news and analysis—as well as one of the most intelligent and reliable film critics writing today. His strong opinions and take-in-or-leave-it attitude have rustled a few feathers—you can thank him for reigniting the Great Online Video-Games-as-Art Wars recently—but he always backed them up with thoughtfulness and an understanding of and appreciation for film history and theory. As you can tell from how often I mention it on this blog, CHUD is my primary source for film news and analysis, and Devin's contributions there have been a huge part of making that so. (The fact that we're currently making our way through the Planet of the Apes series is thanks to him.) During the past few years that I've been regularly visiting CHUD, Devin's reviews and articles have done a lot to increase my appreciation for and critical thinking about film, and I would unhesitatingly recommend them to anyone else interested in enlarging his cinematic world.

I wish him all the best and plan to continue following his work. And despite losing him, CHUD still has too many immensely talented contributors to cease being an enlightening and entertaining source for all things filmic.