Plotline swan song

THE Oscar nominations threw up few surprises, the Academy giving predictable nods to the over-rated films that have been doing the rounds of this year’s awards circuit.

BLACK SWAN
DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky
STARRING: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey
CERT: 16
Films like True Grit, a decent Western but not a particularly memorable movie and The Social Network, whose widespread acclaim baffles me. Critics have called it ‘groundbreaking’, clearly mistaking the movie about Facebook with the actual social network. Then there’s Inception, which has moments of class but overall gives new meaning to the old saying: If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
But the most over-rated of them all is Black Swan. This is the kind of film you’re supposed to like, the kind of thing that sends the critic running for his thesaurus to find the perfect words with which to impress his fellow critics. Well, I gave it a shot, just to see, but I couldn’t construct a better description of the film than my first thought when I saw it, ‘a load of bloody pretentious twaddle’.
I should add here that this is not to rain on the excellent Natalie Portman’s parade. Her performance is brilliant and she deserves all the praise she’s getting. She just happens to be doing her great thing in a film that’s a hack job masquerading as art.
Portman plays Nina, a ballet dancer who’s been on the fringes a while and finally gets her break when she lands the lead in Swan Lake. The company’s ageing star dancer Beth (Ryder) has been ousted by director Thomas (Cassel) and he picks Nina as her replacement. Nina makes the perfect White Swan, but doesn’t seem to have it in her to pull off the darker Black Swan alter ego. So Thomas pushes her to get in touch with her bad side, which chiefly and predictably means the sexual encounters that everyone’s been talking about. Everyone except the critics, who seem at a loss for colourful hyperbole on that strand of the story.
This involves an ambiguous relationship with newly arrived dancer Lily (Kunis), the old clichéd free spirit, everything Nina is not and a good Black Swan into the bargain.
All the while, Nina is pulling away from the suffocating protection of her mother (Hershey), who wants her daughter to remain a little girl and has mixed feelings about her newfound success.
Anyway, Nina, who seems a tad emotionally fragile to begin with, goes bonkers altogether under all this new pressure. Director Aronofsky might think he’s keeping his audience guessing about what’s going on there, but when it looks like Nina is going to turn into a werewolf, it’s kind of obvious the poor girl is not taking her medicine.
You have to take your hat off to Aronofsky, simply for making the leap from directing Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, to the world of professional ballet – from large men beating each other with chairs to a troupe of girls swanning gracefully around in tutus, when they’re not bitching and back-stabbing and throwing themselves under cars in a huff.
But where the director got right to the heart of an ageing fighter surveying the wreckage of his life, in entering the world of women and trying to explore the physical and mental toll of pursuing great art, he loses his way and disappears without trace where the sun don’t shine.
He owes a lot to Portman here and to Barbara Hershey, and to a lesser extent Mila Kunis. I don’t know anything about ballet, so I can’t say if Portman’s year of training makes her dancing authentic, but it certainly look nice. The film as a whole is visually good, except when the dreaded hand-held camera makes its dizzying appearance. The soundtrack is fine too.
So it’s a pity that what’s playing out on screen is such a load of juvenile junk, basically an erotic thriller with notions about itself. As someone has pointed out, if Joel Schumacher had directed this, the critics would be howling with laughter and scorn.
Instead it’s love and cheers and Oscar time for another nudist emperor.

HEREAFTER
DIRECTED BY: Clint Eastwood
STARRING: Matt Damon, Cecile De France, Jay Mohr
CERT: 12A
CLINT Eastwood is a fine director (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby), but for every one of his great films, he seems to serve up a couple of worthy but underwhelming movies (Letters From Iwo Jima, Changeling, Invictus). Hereafter is one of the latter, an ambitious effort but ultimately a dud.
Eastwood tries to weave together three stories of death and the afterlife. The first involves French journalist Marie LeLay (De France), a tsunami survivor who starts to have strange visions and is put out to pasture by her office lover so she can finally get to work on her book about Francois Mitterand. Instead, she tries to convince her publishers to run with a book about the stuff she’s seeing in her head.
Meanwhile in San Francisco, factory worker George Lonegan (Damon) is busy distancing himself from his past career as a medium, but finds he can’t escape the attentions of people who want a word or two from their dear departed in the great beyond.
In London, twins Marcus and Jason (Frankie and George McLaren) try to protect their drunken mother, but life in the flat is shattered when one of the boys has an accident while running from thugs.
Damon’s story is the strongest of the three here and it might have made a great film if Eastwood had ditched the other two. Cecile De France is a fine looking woman and a good actor, but her tale is like most French films ever made, beautiful wealthy people boring everyone with moody talk and politics.
As for the English strand, well, maybe it would have worked with a better writer and a mother and two kids who could actually act. Just thinking about how Eastwood tries to tie all the stories together in the end is hurting my head, so I think we’ll call it a day.