'Black Swan' review: She's dancing on the edge

There's something demented about "Black Swan" and not in a good way. It's excessive and psychologically imprecise, coarse where it should be refined and too much like a David Cronenberg horror movie in places where restraint and intellectual rigor are called for. Yet, this story of an up-and-coming ballerina facing a psychological crisis is the movie out there most worth talking about - and so, in way, it's the most worth seeing.

For all its ham-fistedness, it captures something about the tyranny of the ballet world and, by extension, the neurotic imprisonment of female body image. The asceticism and beauty of ballet and the subjugation, ritual and devotion that a ballerina's life requires have no other modern equivalent. To find anything like it, you'd have to go back to some medieval cult of hysterical, self-flagellating nuns. Both examples involve young women pursuing some rarefied transcendence that, in a mythic way, speaks to a larger world of female fantasy and experience.

Jane Campion, with her cold meticulousness and woman's insight, could have made a masterpiece out of this material. But Darren Aronofsky, a more full-bodied but less psychologically astute director, is the one who made it. He concentrates on the physical details - the cracked toenails, the toes that stick together, the dislocated ribs, the slippers, the pain, the blood - in ways that call to mind his previous film, "The Wrestler." What he doesn't understand, he brazens through.

At the center of the tempest is Natalie Portman as a ballerina who has devoted every waking minute of her life to her dream, and now it's really, really close. She is up for the role of the Swan Queen in a new production of "Swan Lake," but the ballet master (Vincent Cassel), though certain of her incarnation as the virtuous White Swan half of the dual role, doubts that she has the sexual allure and spontaneity to play the White Swan's evil twin ... the Black Swan.

Nina (Portman) is contrasted with Mila Kunis, as Lily, who has Black Swan written all over her. Her ease in her body is an unspoken rebuke to Nina's self-punishment - the rigidness and perfection that is limiting Nina's artistry. Kunis wonderfully epitomizes the freedom, sexuality and confidence of an undamaged self.

But then anyone would be damaged with a mother like Nina's, who waits, every night, for Nina to come through the door and then pounces on her with questions and smothering solicitation. The toxic interaction between Portman and Barbara Hershey as mother and daughter is the most charged and subtle element in the film. Mom is loving and attentive but witchy and scary, so narcissistic and conflicted that she can't see the unspeakable truth, that she wants her daughter to fail.

The film's central question is whether Nina can break with Mom decisively enough to find the Black Swan within. We see the strain in the frightened compression of Portman's face, as her artistic and emotional lives converge. The familiar showbiz trope - will she hold it together for opening night? - has been rarely if ever conveyed in such extreme terms. She will either end up the toast of the town or in a straitjacket.

The line between realized artistry and mental disorder can be blurry, and this is where the filmmakers, particularly Aronofsky, lose control and come near turning "Black Swan" into a full-blown psycho movie. Every object becomes a potential weapon. Blood is everywhere. Yet the more flamboyant the movie gets, the less dramatic, and the movie's lack of clarity in its fundamental psychological terms becomes a letdown. Yes, she's cracking up, but how she's cracking up becomes muddled. Still, this is a movie of serious ambition, and to recognize the distance between its achievement and its aspiration is not to deny its quality.

If Portman's performance falls short of greatness it's the fault of the movie for being more about style than revelation. Still, her emotional repression and physical intensity are impressive, and she goes deep into every area Aronofsky offers her, doing absolutely everything she can do with what's there. Oscars have been won for less.

-- Advisory: Blood, sexual situations, simulated sex.

E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle