Black Swan

***1/2 - The culmination of his dozen or so years thus far spent in the film directing business, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological drama “Black Swan” shows like no other of his films how polarizing he can be to an audience. When I use the term ‘polarizing’ here I don’t mean it in the sense that it has the potential to be either loved or loathed depending upon the individual viewer - although it does, indeed, have that quality in spades. What I mean is that the film can polarize an individual viewer’s mind by taking a dull and pretentious plot about an art form that is – to me – completely unnecessary and combining it with an extraordinary and haunting character study of the pressures and psychoses of a frail and fragile person. All of his prior films showed flashes of this, but in none of them was it the most prevalent thing that I took away from it as a viewer. Discarding all the ballet crap in this, the only other thing I really object to is the fact that “Black Swan” shows that as his career has progressed Aronofsky has seemed to steer even farther away from intellectual story-driven fare and toward solely character-based melodrama. That may make him a darling in European cinema circles, but my own personal tastes lie elsewhere. In any event, whether you enjoy the movie’s subject matter or not (and I most definitely did not), I think it would be pretty hard for anyone with even a remote interest in film as an art form to say that “Black Swan” wasn’t one of the more effective portrayals of a descent into madness that has been attempted in a fairly significant amount of time.