Black Swan: The $100 Million Dollar Ballet Blockbuster

If someone were to tell me about this time last year that a film about ballet would gross almost $100 million dollars and garner five Academy Award nominations—including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress—I guarantee I would have rolled my eyes at you. I wouldn’t doubt that from a critical standpoint, a film about ballet would represent well at the Oscars. After all, in 1951, An American In Paris took home the Best Picture Oscar largely on the strength of its dazzling 18-minute ballet-inspired finale. Also, these types of pictures generally clean house when it comes to the technical categories like Art Direction, Costume Design, Makeup, etc.

Not so long ago though, $100 million dollars was considered the threshold for a film to be called a blockbuster. By that reckoning, Black Swan is certainly one of the strangest and most polarizing films to attract both award attention and mass audiences. For how unlikely a blockbuster the film seems, upon closer examination Black Swan has many elements that have combined to give it mass appeal.

Darren Aronofsky, the film’s director, has to be a big consideration. While Aronofsky has never really made films that have the reputation for being money makers, he does have the reputation of being a master craftsman who has translated difficult subject matter to the screen. Of the four Aronofsky films preceding Black Swan, two have become certifiable classics. In 2000, he adapted Hubert Selby’s novel about drug addiction, Requiem for a Dream, into an unflinching and powerful film. Requiem for a Dream is notable for several outstanding performances, a hyper-kinetic editing style, and contains several scenes of utter depravity that have gone further down the drug addiction spiral than any film before it or any film since. Nearly everyone who has seen the film truly admires it, yet also feels that it is a cinematic experience that once seen, is to unbearable to be watched again.

Aronofsky’s other classic is 2008’s The Wrestler. The Wrestler is very much like Black Swan, in that the main characters are athletic performers in often misunderstood forms of entertainment who sacrifice their bodies to an extreme limit because of dedication to their craft. Randy the Ram—the protagonist played by Mickey Rourke in his big comeback role—has punished his body for professional wrestling, and both films examine how sacrificing one’s body toward art changes the psyche of the athlete who offers their body to their craft. While The Wrestler was not the runaway success Black Swan has been at the box office, the $26 million dollars it made certainly exceeded any expectations box office prognosticators had for a film about professional wrestling with a burned out star in the lead. In fact, had Sean Penn not played Harvey Milk that year, Mickey Rourke would have certainly won the Oscar for Best Actor (Rourke did win the Golden Globe).

The biggest impact The Wrestler made was to establish Aronofsky as a reliable auteur filmmaker in the mold of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino or Stanley Kubrick. A film can now be sold based simply on Aronofsky’s name. He is a filmmaker associated with both quality and risk, and his films have a track record of delivering unique experiences. Black Swan reaped the benefits of Aronofsky establishing his credentials through his previous filmography. There was always going to be a percentage of the audience waiting for his next film.

In terms of drawing audiences, Natalie Portman’s popularity cannot be underestimated. She has been in films both epic—the Star Wars prequels—and intimate—Mike Nichols’ Closer, for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Portman has also cultivated a controversy-free, appealing image that balances her Harvard education with her vegetarian activism and her history as a child actress. I can’t think of anyone saying they hate Natalie Portman. She’s a bonafide movie star in the mold of Audrey Hepburn.

That said, her role as Nina Sayers in the film allows Portman to go further than she has ever gone as an actress before. Aronofsky is wise to play off Portman’s good-girl image when he cast her in the role. A key plot point is that the ballet company in the film is staging Swan Lake, and the lead role in the production requires the ballerina to play both the good and evil personas of the Swan Queen. Nina’s perfect, delicate style makes her perhaps overqualified to play the “good” persona, but she seems to lack the passion and the sexuality to render the “evil” persona convincingly. Portman herself has played many goody-goody, sweetheart, and cutie pie roles. Speaking personally, I have always found Portman to never quite live up to her astonishing debut as the vengeful Mathilde in Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994), a role she played at the age of 12. Portman herself said, "I'm trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film, especially being such a small person."

Combine Portman’s ambitions with the demands of the role—the intensive ballet training required for the part, the significant weight loss that goes with it, the intense and insular nature of the character, the explicit sexuality—and the stage is set for a popular, beloved actor to deliver a once-in-a-lifetime performance. I would compare the role favorably to Robert DeNiro’s Oscar winning turn as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, especially in the physical transformations necessary to make the part work.

The other two factors that account for the film’s popularity are the lurid subject matter and the fact that it is a film about ballet. Even before I saw a preview for the film, I knew that it was going to be more of a hallucinatory thriller than a film about the art of ballet. What I didn’t expect is how much melodrama was contained in the film. A key subplot is straight out of All About Eve, in that Nina usurps the part of the Swan Queen from an older ballerina (played by Winona Ryder—and that also is a bit of brilliant casting, as Portman has basically played the sorts of roles in the 2000’s-2010’s that Ryder played in the late 1980’s-1990’s). In turn, Nina is also constantly looking over her shoulder at her looser, more comfortably sexual understudy Lily (Mila Kunis, and who would have ever figured the chick who played Jackie on That ‘70’s Show had a performance like this in her), who seems like a more natural choice to play the evil Swan Queen. There is also tons of sex in the film, as the repressed Nina is basically kept in girlhood by her dominating mother (Barbara Hershey). As frenemy relationship is forged between Nina and Lily, Nina allows herself to open up sexually to Lily, culminating in a full-on lesbian sex scene between the two characters. I’m sure straight males everywhere (and probably many women) forgave their wives and girlfriends for dragging them to see the “ballet flick” after seeing Mila Kunis go down on Natalie Portman. Backstage backbiting, hallucinations, lesbian sex—there is more than enough drama in Black Swan to help audiences overcome the fact that the film is a “ballet movie”.

None of the above should discount the fact that there are many, many people who are going to see Black Swan precisely because it is a ballet movie. How many little girls in this country have taken ballet classes at some point and carried fond memories of those times into adulthood? Ballet has always managed to capture the dreams of women (and let’s face it—probably many men too). It’s fantasy. It’s Natalie Portman as a ballerina. It’s a rare chance to see the art of ballet on the silver screen. Aronofsky certainly makes the dancing the major attraction of the film. His warts-and-all approach to ballet only gives the audience further appreciation of the art. The scene where Nina’s big toe splits open quickly dispels any romantic notions of ballet, and those scenes also greatly appeal to the people in the audience who love body horror—and Black Swan is also most certainly a body horror film.

With such a broad variety of ways Black Swan appeals to moviegoers it is unsurprising that the film is a hit. Which begs the question: is the film worthy of Best Picture? In answering it, some bipolar attitudes about the film are revealed.

I was surprised that Black Swan did not receive any nominations for Art Direction, Costume Design, or Makeup—three categories I thought were absolute locks for the film. (Score was never going to be a factor, since most of the film uses Tchaikovsky, and scores that use an abundance of previously used material are ineligible for Oscar nominations.) Yet it did receive nominations for Cinematography and Editing—which are probably the two most prestige of the technical categories. Aronofsky received his first nomination, and the film’s best chance at receiving Oscar gold is via Natalie Portman for Best Actress, who looks to be a lock. Despite several positive notices neither Mila Kunis (who did receive a Golden Globe nomination) nor Barbara Hershey scored a Supporting Actress nomination.

The most telling thing when you look at Black Swan’s nomination tally is that the film did not receive a nomination for Original Screenplay, and justifiably so. The screenplay is easily the weakest part of the film. For starters, I don’t think the script is the best at balancing the ballet elements with the psychological horror elements of the film. When a key plot point of the film has—SPOILERS AHEAD—Nina literally transforming into a black swan, the screenwriting team of Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin are asking the audience to take a major leap of faith. The ballet portions of the film are so well grounded—and the most interesting—that Nina’s psychoses seem like plot devices instead of organically part of the narrative.

I also think that the characters function more as symbols than real people. Nina’s character is represents virginity, repression and almost a clinical perfection. Lily is earthy, sexual and uninhibited. Both Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey’s characters represent the ballerina gone to pasture, and Hershey has the added bonus of playing a psycho mother. Poor Natalie Portman though, for all the grueling physical preparation and transformation her body endured for the role, plays a character that is largely a cipher. Nina is motivated to be “perfect” but we never see how Nina specifies perfection or the process in which she can achieve it. A huge fuss is made over her character not being passionate enough to play the evil Swan Queen, and we never see the moment when Nina earns the role. We are told she bites the lip of her director (Vincent Cassel, oozing smarm) so hard she draws blood when he tries to kiss her, but the actual bite is never shown. For a film that revels in shots of toenails splitting in two, this is a huge missed opportunity. The way Nina is written I never felt access to her, I never felt like I was being carried along side this girl on her journey. By the time the finale rolls around, I did not have an emotional connection to Nina; I was simply watching to see how the melodrama plays out. When comparing Nina to Randy the Ram in The Wrestler—which was written by a different screenwriter—it’s night and day as to which character seems more like a real person and less like a plot device. It’s a shame, for as much as Portman sacrificed her body for the role; the screenwriters gave her very little material to carve out a character that feels real.

Ultimately, I think Black Swan benefits from the Academy expanding the field of nominees to ten instead of the more traditional five. I think Aronofsky would have secured a nomination anyway—his virtuosity as a director is on constant display—but the film itself is simply too strange to be a film with a solid chance at winning the Oscar. It’s very polarizing—popular consensus shows there are as many people who hate the film as claim to love it—which also probably accounts for its box office popularity. I know I always want to see a polarizing film so I can form my own opinions. Ultimately, I think Black Swan is a technical masterpiece that does not do enough to win the characters over on me. It’s a beautiful, but largely emotionless film. That said there are plenty of elements within the film to satisfy the curiosities of moviegoers, accounting for its surprising box office totals.

DETAILS

Black Swan (2010)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Starring: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Vincent Cassel

Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures (20th Century Fox)

Total Oscar Nominations: 5 (Best Picture—Scott Franklin, Mike Medavoy, Arnold Messer, Brian Oliver; Best Director—Darren Aronofsky; Best Actress—Natalie Portman; Best Cinematography—Matthew Libatique; Best Editing—Andrew Weisblum)

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An American in Paris: Ars Gratia Artis, part II

It will probably be best to start this review by saying that this will be less a summary of the 1951 Best Picture winner than an examination of what makes a movie a movie instead of something more properly categorized as part of another artistic medium. But I will be honest with you: as a movie, I think An American in Paris is a failure.

Unsurprisingly, the studio behind this art-for-art’s-sake musical is MGM (whose motto, visible under a roaring Leo the Lion at the start of every MGM film, is “ars gratia artis”). No studio was more adept at staging and producing musicals than MGM. From the silent era through the 1930’s and up until the American involvement in WWII, MGM was the undisputed champion studio of Hollywood. No studio had more stars under contract. No studio made more profitable and critically regarded pictures. In the 1940’s, MGM made a slow decline. Likely precipitated with the death of “boy genius” producer Irving G. Thalberg in 1936, Louis B. Mayer became both studio head and head of production (Thalberg’s old role). Where Thalberg preferred to mount tasteful and literary productions, Mayer liked crowd-pleasers, and when Mayer became entrenched atop MGM, he and his management team released a series after series of “serial films”, like the Thin Man series with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the Andy Hardy films, and the “backyard musicals” starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, starting with Babes in Arms. Ultimately, production decreased by half; by 1940, MGM had gone from producing 50+ films a year to roughly 25.

MGM was onto something with the Garland/Rooney musicals though. Babes in Arms was produced by lyricist-turned-producer Arthur Freed, and Freed would eventually become the most celebrated producer of movie musicals ever. While other studios shied away from musicals because of the expensive costs associated with staging them—after all a musical needs not only a film crew and actors, but also a team of songwriters, composers, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, more advanced and elaborate production values (namely costumes and sets)—musicals accounted for roughly a quarter of MGM’s output in the 1940’s. (I would also argue that shifting tastes in audiences hardened by the realities of WWII caused the genre to be less popular with the other studios in Hollywood.) By 1950, MGM’s musicals were threatening to bankrupt the studio, and Mayer was ousted after creative conflicts with his “new Thalberg” Dore Schary. Mayer preferred wholesome, mainstream entertainment; Schary preferred edgier message films. The new guy won.

Despite Schary’s preferences for more mature material and the fact that MGM’s musicals placed a hefty burden on the overall operating budget of the studio, Freed’s productions were successful enough to justify their expense, but more importantly—the musicals carved out the identity of the studio. Freed ran his musical unit as an essentially independent film studio within MGM. He was able to attract top talent from Broadway by providing them nearly total creative control. Such autonomy was unheard of in an era where movie studios—MGM especially so—were controlled by corporate committee. Free rein in hand, the most talented musical performers in entertainment could be found at MGM—Garland, Fred Astaire, Lena Horne, Red Skelton, Frank Sinatra, and both the star and director of An American in Paris, Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli, respectively.

Minnelli was Freed’s top director. Possessed of incredible taste and style, Minnelli helmed Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944 with Garland, his future wife, as star (their union produced a daughter, Liza). Garland’s versions of “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” were featured in the film and immediately became standards. Minnelli and Garland would collaborate several times in musicals of a variety of different genres (for example, they teamed with Kelly in 1948 in The Pirate). Minnelli was also skilled in bringing lighthearted melodramas to life. In 1950, he directed Father of the Bride to several Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for Spencer Tracy and Best Picture.

Gene Kelly was the most ambitious dancer of the era. Unlike the only male dancer rightfully considered his peer, Fred Astaire, who was a lean, lithe classicist—Kelly was muscular, brawny and a boundary pusher. One of his earliest films for MGM, Anchors Aweigh, had Kelly partnered with Jerry Mouse in a dance duet that combined live-action and animation. The film also starred Frank Sinatra, whom Kelly would co-star with three times. In the Kelly/Sinatra film On the Town, the pair made extensive use of real-life locations in Manhattan, one of the earliest instances of taking a musical outside of the studio. Kelly was also a huge fan of ballet, and was a constant proponent of using ballet in musical films.

Minnelli and Kelly would find themselves ideally matched in An American in Paris. With both men being ambitious artists given near-total artistic freedom from Arthur Freed the stage was set for a musical which would shatter conventions.

When looked at as a musical that achieved the unexpected, An American in Paris is a complete success. One of the earliest scenes in the film showcases its young lead actress—French-born Leslie Caron, 19 at the time of filming (and who would later re-team with Minnelli and Freed in the 1958 Best Picture winner, Gigi)—in an impressionistic sequence where we see five different styles of dance—each accentuated by a different color—expressing the different moods and aspects of Caron’s character, Lise. Within the first act of the film, the audience knows that dance—not story, not acting—will establish character.

Another unconventional scene that establishes character is centered on Adam (Oscar Levant)—in the best friend role to Gene Kelly’s lead. The script gives meager details about Adam, aside from his musical virtuosity on the piano, a detail that he has lived on an endless series of fellowships, and that his cynicism is used as a foil to the general optimism of Gene Kelly’s character, Jerry Mulligan. In a dream sequence, Adam imagines himself playing George Gershwin’s “Piano Concerto in F”. At first it is just Adam on the piano, but the dream becomes more elaborate with Adam taking on the role of conductor, then a variety of other instruments in the orchestra, and finally as a member of the audience who is applauding his own performance. Minnelli uses split-screen and special effects to portray Levant as a wunderkind, one-man orchestra, but what it best about the scene—my favorite in the film—is that the dream suggests Adam has feelings of inadequacy toward his genius. He only feels successful in his dreams, where he can be in complete control of his performances and how they are received. In the context of the dream, it is easy to understand why this character—though granted a series of opportunities to live up to his potential as an artist, has ultimately failed to do so.

The finale of An American in Paris contains the single most avant-garde sequence to ever appear in a Best Picture winner. Unique for even musicals, Kelly and Minnelli stage a wordless, uninterrupted seventeen-minute ballet sequence where Jerry and Lise tell the story of their relationship and time in Paris (essentially recapping the entire film). Audaciously, the ballet is inspired by French impressionist painters (a key detail, as Jerry is an artist) Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, Vincent Van Gogh (a Dutchman, but nevertheless closely associated with Paris), Henri Rousseau and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Kelly and Caron dance through stages where works by these painters spring to life—the dancers are costumed like the people in the paintings, and Minnelli pumps in colored smoke to surreal effect, making the colors of the art something tangible for the dancers to pass through. For added effect, Kelly incorporates several styles of dance in the finale—modern, tap, jazz, classical, and yes, ballet. Overall, the “American in Paris Ballet” is a vivid, inspired and masterfully executed sequence that provides a very untraditional end to a genre of films that demands tradition.

Apart from the rest of the film, the convention-breaking sequences I’ve just discussed would, by themselves be worthy of Academy honor. But there’s the rest of the movie to deal with.

Now, musicals have never been noted for containing screenplays with the depth, wit, or insight of films like All About Eve or Casablanca. The story is likely beyond tertiary in a musical. The songs, dancing, and performers are the draw for these films. Suspension of disbelief is key. Believe me; I have no problem with suspension of disbelief. I think Aliens is the greatest movie ever made, and to buy into that, you have to believe on some level that predatory, acid-for-blood aliens exist. I can buy into a ton of bullshit Hollywood shovels my way. The story in this film is so insipid and implausible that I just couldn’t do it.

Jerry is an ex-G.I. who has remained in Paris after WWII to pursue his passion of becoming a painter. He lives on the West Bank of the Seine among other artists in Montmartre. The building Jerry and his neighbor Adam (the concert pianist living off of renewed fellowships) live in is indicative of their status as starving artists (the Rube Goldberg design of Jerry’s flat is another area where an artistic element in film—in this case, set design—really helps to establish character). One day, while dining in the bistro below their apartments, Jerry and Adam reunite with one of Adam’s old partners, the dapper Henri (Georges Guetary), who has been a successful music hall entertainer. Henri tells Jerry and Adam about his new love, Lise (cue Leslie Caron’s entrance in her five-faceted dance number).

Next, the film delves into Jerry’s struggles to establish himself as an artist. One day, while selling his paintings on the street, his work catches the eye of Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), a wealthy American. Milo buys two of Jerry’s paintings and eventually offers to be his sponsor. Jerry suspects that Milo has interest in having Jerry become her kept man, and he resists any and all seduction from his patroness, even offering to return the money Milo has given him for his work.

Yet Jerry is persuaded to go out with Milo on a few harmless dates, and it is at a nightclub where he meets Lise, and Jerry is immediately smitten. Lise tells Jerry that she is flatly uninterested in beginning a romantic relationship with him—after all, she is with Henri, unbeknownst to Jerry—yet Jerry continues to pursue Lise with zeal that borderlines on stalking. Eventually, she too is won over and goes on a date with Jerry that ends with a lovely dance between the pair.

Complications, of course, ensue. Milo becomes more aggressive in her patronage, offering Jerry his own studio where he can live and create art unburdened by financial restraint. A guilt ridden Lise admits to Jerry that she is engaged to Henri, and she feels devotion and obligation toward him because he saved her after he parents were killed during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Jerry and Lise mutually part despite a growing attraction, and Jerry accepts Milo’s sponsorship.

In the final act, all of the characters are brought together at a black-and-white ball, Lise and Jerry confront one another again, cue the extended ballet-sequence, and when the film returns to normal, Henri leaves, allowing Jerry and Lise—the true lovers—to be together.

I had all sorts of problems with the story. First of all, it doesn’t seem remotely plausible that Jerry would outright reject Milo’s offer. Although Milo is clearly sexually attracted to Jerry, it is never once implied in the film that they sleep together or that Jerry sleeping with Milo is an absolute condition of her support for him. She may be a cougar, but she is also a businesswoman. Also, Jerry has never had the opportunities Adam has, so his rejection of financial support seems too cynical for his character.

Then there is the Lise/Jerry/Henri love triangle. None of these characters are given any real reason to fall in love with one another, or why their relationships would work. Only after Jerry pesters Lise to the point where she has to go out with him to get rid of him does she agree to see him. Jerry and Lise fall in love because he is played by Gene Kelly and she is played by Leslie Caron, and Hollywood dictates that the stars must end up together. Furthermore, we are given a decent enough reason why Henri and Lise would be together. She feels obligated to him, he clearly adores her, and he’s financially stable, doesn’t treat her like shit, and allows her to be herself. Why would Lise even think about straying, and why doesn’t Henri put up a fight? No man is that much of a gentleman.

I also don’t think that—aside from their dancing, which is sublime—Kelly and Caron have any romantic chemistry. Suspension of disbelief can work really easily when there is chemistry along the lines of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Gable and Vivien Leigh, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Kelly and Caron can’t hold a candle to those pairings. Even in musicals, where not much more than “love at first sight” is required to buy into a relationship, there has to be some sort of implied, subtle reason why two characters will fall in love. Maria and Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music complete one another; she gets him to loosen up and provides a much needed mother role for his children, he shows her that love can come from other places than God. Tony and Maria in West Side Story have the Romeo and Juliet thing going for them. Even in a musical as stupid as Grease there is subtext as to why Danny and Sandy should be together (they can both be themselves around each other). In the storyline of An American in Paris, Jerry and Lise have nothing, no tangible reason for an audience to buy into their relationship, a supposed demonstration of true love.

Of course, all of the information you need to understand these characters is within the musical numbers (though I could live without the Gershwin standards—I vastly prefer an original or Broadway adapted musical score in a musical film). But that brings me to my original point: if the musical numbers, ballet sequences and other avant-garde indulgences is what really makes An American in Paris, is it really then a musical film, or is it a hybrid form of ballet and other artistic mediums?

Suspension of disbelief aside, I expect a film to have a logical screenplay as its foundation. Without one, you have the filmic equivalent of gibberish. Look at music videos. While some videos do tell elaborate stories, most simply exist to marry image, sensations, and music. With no original songwriting material, is An American in Paris no more than an extended music video for Gershwin tunes and Francophiles? Is this really a movie?

History really seals the deal for me. One year later, Gene Kelly teamed up with another celebrated director within MGM’s Freed unit—Stanley Donen—to create Singin’ in the Rain, which is widely considered to be the greatest musical ever filmed. That film also indulges Kelly’s tastes for bringing extended, avant-garde ballet sequences to film, has genre-defying numbers, and the music (save one song) is entirely recycled material. The difference between Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris: the story in the former film makes fucking sense. The characters behave logically. The 1927 Hollywood setting perfectly serves the themes of the story—talking films are replacing silent pictures. The acting is magnificent. The satire and comedy works. You buy into the world that is created on screen.

The other key difference: An American in Paris won six Oscars from eight nominations, Singin’ in the Rain was virtually ignored the next year with two nominations and zero wins. That represents one of the grossest oversights in Academy Awards history. Singin’ in the Rain is a movie musical done absolutely right. An American in Paris is an experiment that indulges in far too many art-for-art’s-sake moments that shifts the work from being a movie into something else.

DETAILS

An American in Paris (1951)

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Starring: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Nina Foch, Georges Guetary

Studio: MGM

Total Oscars: 6 (Best Picture—Arthur Freed*, Best Original Screenplay—Alan Jay Lerner**, Best Art Direction (color), Best Cinematography (color), Best Costume Design (color), Best Score) from 8 total nominations*** (Best Director—Vincente Minnelli, Best Editing)

*Freed was also awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the ceremony
**The category for Lerner’s award was properly titled Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
***Gene Kelly also received an Honorary Oscar—his only—that year for "his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film."

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