I was living in St. Louis in 1998 when Darren Aronofsky’s Pi premiered at the Tivoli Theater in University City. It hit the screens with very little fanfare. I never saw a trailer, never read a review. I knew nothing more about this movie than what the blurb on the marquee and the lines down the block told me. For some reason people were going to see this movie in droves. After a couple of weeks of wondering why, I decided to pop in and check it out. I was floored. Pi was gritty and original. An entirely unexpected arthouse hit. It was immediately obvious that Darren Aronofsky was on his way.
In the years that followed, Aronofsky remained in the cinema spotlight either through the handful of movies he made, or through the multitude of ones that he didn’t. Few can compete with his contributions to the film geek rumor mill. For years there seemed to be constant speculation on the director’s involvement in everything from audacious pet projects to studio tent pole flicks. He was long pegged to be the director of choice for Warner Bros’ reboot of the Batman franchise, a job which eventually went to his comparable contemporary Christopher Nolan. But through all of this conjecture, Aronofsky has managed to stay away from the superbudget Hollywood hype pics and has kept to more personal projects like Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and the (overly?) ambitious The Fountain.
His latest film, Black Swan, fits perfectly within his catalog to date. It’s a relatively small, arthouse movie with the ambition to achieve the scope of an epic. This is the tricky balancing act that Aronofsky has been attempting for his entire career. The success of this feat requires a certain set of cinematic tools, some of which Aronofsky possesses.
Aronofsky is a master of visceral filmmaking. There are few, if any, active directors who are better able to convey to an audience the physical anguish of a character. His style is reminiscent of a literary concept first introduced to me at a reading by the author Chuck Palahniuk. He talked about a writing tool he utilizes called “On the Body” which he described as a way to use physical sensations like injuries and other ailments to induce the audience into an empathetic relationship with his characters. Aronofsky seems to cinematically embrace this concept. He is highly adept at drawing the viewer into a somatic sympathy with the inhabitants of his films. In that context, Black Swan may be his best work.
On my first viewing of Black Swan, I found myself literally moved. It’s been a long time since a film made me, and the people around me, jump and cringe as much as this one. It reminded me of the early work of Roman Polanski in its ability to seduce the audience into actual physical involvement. That interactive quality lends itself beautifully to the sub-theme of physiological deterioration which pervades the entire picture. As each scene follows the last, it creates a compilation of visual and auditory body blows that work to drag the viewer down the spiral into which Nina (Natalie Portman) is sliding. On that level, the film works. But Black Swan isn’t just about a character’s physical degradation. It’s about a descent into madness. It’s about the psyche of a performer being torn apart as she delves into her darker self. To fully express this theme one must place the audience in the character’s mind. Make us understand what it means to actually step over the line of sanity and completely lose control. But is Aronofsky as adept at putting us in the head of the character as he is at putting us “on the body”?
On a second look, with all of the shock and awe of the initial screening washed away, Black Swan simply came up short. I spent this second viewing disinterested in the physical aspects of the character’s journey and instead spent it searching for the soul of the picture. I was completely unable to get a grasp on it. While it is a technically outstanding film, it is a mediocre story; unoriginal and tired. Thematically, it is a film we’ve all seen a thousand times before from De Palma’s Sisters to David Fincher’s Fight Club. But the story of Black Swan fails not only in unoriginality of theme but in its unimaginative visual execution. Aronofsky often uses hackneyed imagery (repetitive mirror images, endless hallucinatory double-takes) to express Nina’s slip from sanity. Many of these basic tropes can be found in the multitude of straight to video horror flicks that are churned out on a weekly basis. Simply put, Black Swan lacks the story to match its package and with all its beautiful cinematography, textured sound design, and impressive performances it adds up to nothing more than a cheap thrill-ride in an arthouse disguise.
This realization concerning Black Swan made me reconsider the whole of Aronofsky’s career. Thinking back to the times I’ve rewatched his previous films, I remember how impactful they seemed at first, and how poorly they held up. Broken down to their bare elements I start to see that there just isn’t any truth in them. Aronofsky’s an illusionist, a master of misdirection. For the most part this isn’t a bad trait for a filmmaker to have but it does leave one susceptible to exposure once the illusion is washed away. When the bells-and-whistles echo out, the heart of an artist is revealed. Aronofsky just doesn’t have the heart. At the center of each of his films is a sensationalized and superficial perspective which comes across as inhuman and cold. Perhaps the only truly “human” film in his repertoire is his 2008 film The Wrestler, and one could argue that the depth of that film is entirely attributable to Mickey Rourke’s raw and empathetic performance. Luckily for Aronofsky, good performers tend to tag along with prestigious directors, no matter how dubiously earned that prestige may be.
After more than a decade in the arthouse, Aronofsky has finally decided to stop sidestepping the studios and has signed on to direct next year’s The Wolverine, a massive tent pole Marvel Comics project which will reunite him with his The Fountain costar Hugh Jackman. It’ll be interesting to see how Aronofsky’s visceral style melds with the world of superhuman fight sequences and over the top CG effects. And Wolverine might be the perfect character for him to explore. He’s simple, archetypal, and in a constant state of pain. Aronofsky may be the perfect director for a project like this. Hollywood may be the perfect place for him after all.
