Darren Aronofsky Special: Reviews & Musings

It can at times be a fickle business, film directing. While many veteran auteurs and money makers continue to produce sellable, and occasionally revered, pieces while hidden by obscurity behind the camera and DVD commentaries, others become bigger than their stars, the real selling point of their films.
As of Autumn 2011, there are a few 'hot' Directors in Hollywood, highly sought after and who's every announced project is greeted with drooling anticipation. There's Christopher Nolan, there's David Fincher and then there's Darren Aronofsky, an art house filmmaker in a mainstream game.

Aronofsky's rise to the top of Hollywood Producer's shortlists follows the trend of unconventional and unpredictable main men, a similar path to the likes of Martin Scorcese and Terry Gilliam. Rather than simply making films, he makes Aronofsky films, highly distinctive pieces jam packed with metaphor, suggestion and most significantly, humanity. His filmography is varied, differing and original, but each effort always has his brand, not so much an egotistical Tarantino esque touch, but an indefinable quality hallmarking his mastery of the screen. It's what every up and coming Director strives for, to be able to make anything, to make it well, but to always gain the credit, to be the unseen other star of the show.

His 1998 debut Pi, an odd ball thriller about a mathematician seeking the perfect equation, budgeted at just $60k, made up mostly by donations from family and friends, and ended up making $3m. By contrast, his next film will be Noah, a $100m epic retelling of the Noah's Arc story. Not bad progress in twelve years, but the recurring theme is often Aronofsky's ability to concoct visceral, screen breaking imagery and storytelling on a modest scale, often relying on a single camera approach to get closer to the characters, putting you in their world, while never giving up on distinct visual style and memorable narrative.

Noah may be his first bank busting effort, but Aronfsky is no stranger to this field. He was the original choice for rebooting the Batman franchise, long before the Nolanverse came to being, and his interpretation of Frank Miller's comic Year One certainly tore up the form book. In a pique of bizzare Hollywood thinking, the reboot was dropped in favour of developing Batman vs Superman, and Aronofsky left the project. His third film, the complex and polarising but ultimately brilliant, The Fountain (reviewed elsewhere on this blog), was originally mooted as a $70m project and remained in limbo for five years before production went ahead, the budget halved. It's a testament to Aronofsky's visual flair that the film looks a huge budget piece, a feast for the eyes. Logic would dictate the biblical saga of next year appearing to be mind blowingly expensive.

Interestingly, the New Yorker's career growth can be best defined by three of his films, incidentally the highest rated of his flicks, with particular stages of the rise to trust in money being layed out. In an attempt to map out the journey, I've reviewed each of the three films and analysed their significance in creating a superstar Director.


The one that got him noticed....


Requiem For a Dream

A soap opera without the soap, Requiem For a Dream is a sombre, restless and utterly tragic tale of four people, dominated by their respective addictions and tortured by delusions and fantasy sharply contrasting their miserable, hopeless existences, based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jnr.

In Brighton Beach, NY, heroin addict Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) plot a money making scheme, using Ty's gang connections. With the cash, he hopes to buy a clothing store for his designer girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly). Meanwhile, Harry's mother Sara (Ellen Burstyn), a shut in who's own addiction is an over the top gameshow, receives news she has been chosen to appear on television, and quickly begins a diet program to reel back the years and ultimately fit into the red dress her late husband was so fond off.
After a bright and hopeful summer, with everyone seemingly heading for better things, events begin to spiral out of control, with Sara slowly becoming hooked on diet pills and losing grip on reality, as no word arrives of her day on the screen. Harry and Tyrone's enterprising is blown out of the water by a gang war, and Marion's addiction leads her towards providing sexual favours for cash. By winter, their lives are falling apart at the seams, leading into a brutal, unforgiving and despairing conclusion as their weakness finally takes it's toll.

Employing speedy, dizzying editing and sharp visual metaphor, Aronofsky avoids the cliched grit and all depiction of drug use, instead focussing on the human cost inflicted on the souls of the four characters. Ultimately sympathetic people with an unstoppable dependency, their downfall is charted not by long monologues and disposable subplots, by the blurrying of the edges of their reality, and their switch from peaceful and contented dysfunctionals into desperate, ragged lackies.

Backed by a rapier, minimalistic script (written by Aronofsky and Selby himself), the powerful and aptmospheric score of Aronofsky stalwart Clint Mansell and superb choice of cinematography and visuals, a bubble is created within the world, in which the characters live, an isolation which is torn into at the fabric by dire consequences. Burstyn (who received an Oscar nod) is superb, a deeply authentic characterisation as the dottery Sara, who quickly descends into psychosis, and Leto sheds the singer-actor stigma with a portrayal full of pathos and subtle touches. Wayans, so often comic relief in lesser films, is charismatic and likeable in a straight role, a strong man dragged down by weakness, while Connelly, in her big break, gives a fully rounded, horribly believable turn.

And, in keeping with the themes and messages of the piece, the finale is a horrifying, heartbreaking and excrutiating endgame to the struggles which precede it. A sledgehammer final message perfectly in keeping with the flow of the story, and the relentlessness of it's execution. The ultimate human cost of the actions perpetrated, the touch paper finally lit.

A visceral, swinging and enthralling piece, albeit full of sickening home truths and reality checks, Aronofsky sucks you into it's world, before delivering a gut shot that leaves the powerful emotional journey etched into your mind for some time. Difficult, stunning, soul detroying film making.

9/10



The one that made his name...


The Wrestler

Follow up to the distorted reality epicness of The Fountain, The Wrestler is a strange direction to take for auteur Aronofsky, going for documentary style framing and fly on the wall biography of a fading force.
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson (Mickey Rourke) is an ageing wrestler, a spent force with his best days behind him. As a career of physical pain finally begins to catch up with him, he faces his mortality and the lonely world he has created for himself.

A big star of the wrestling scene in the 1980's, Randy now exists in the shell of former glories. Reduced to selling autographs at conventions and working part time at a deli to make ends meet, his castle is a trailer he often fails to deliver rent on, his only real friends the fellow fighters he sees from time to time in the ring. After a reunion bout ends with Randy in hospital, he discovers that he has a heart problem akin to angina, making another bout potentially fatal. Realising how limited his life is, he makes efforts to rebuild a relationship with his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), who he hasn't seen since she was small, as well as trying to find some closeness with single-mother stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), also at the wrong end of the age spectrum within her profession.
However, in spite of his efforts, he is a deeply flawed man who makes mistakes, and he finds it almost impossible to lead his life outside of his old haunt. He is ultimately left to risk everything in his attempt to find a happy ending, one way or the other.

Adopting a mockumentary style approach, using handheld cameras to follow Randy and his movements, and focussing on small, personal touches to give us a full angle view on a man on the slide, Aronofsky uses the piece to give us an intimate, in depth character study. With no music, it is left in the actors' hands to bring the emotional workload, and this is where the film comes into it's own. It's not enough to simply say that Rourke is brillinat, because what he brings to the story and to Randy is surely an element nobody else could ever carry off. With a chequered history himself, and similar background (albeit boxing), Rourke brings authenticity at every corner, becoming one with the character, disappearing from view. A tragic and sympathetic, but never self-pittying portrayal, Rourke makes his comeback complete, an unforgetable performance making him a sought after actor once more. He is assisted here by Tomei, who provides a warts and all performance which reminds us her long ago Oscar win was no fluke.

As much as The Wrestler is indeed a character piece, a story of one man's dying livelihood and existence, it is never really about wrestling. You could transplant the tale onto many an other background, it is more a study of mortality and hindsight, about how somebody's prime, no matter how glorious, can ultimately make the twlight years all the more painful and barren. Although Randy never ducks responsiblity for his wrongs, he also never makes excuses, fully aware that what really mattered was once in his hands, and that he traded it in. The end, where he finally comes to terms with his only lasting home, is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, a bizzare paradox totally fitting of a dysfunctional and inperfect character.

Moving in places, bluntly focussed in others, The Wrestler poses the serious questions of the fade from grace and then some, acting as a requiem for a soul far from ever being perfect, and completely human.


9/10



The one that made him a star....


Black Swan

Taking an unconventional setting for a torturous psychological thriller, the world of ballet, and approaching much of it with realistic 'in-their-faces' grittiness which defined The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky here paints a picture of self-destructive strive for perfection with a clear focus of characterisation.

Young, insular and naive dancer Nina (Natalie Portman) lives for her art, with no room for anything else in her life, still locked in a childhood with cuddly toys in her bed and living with her former dancer mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey). When she earns the lead in The White Swan, it is the proudest moment of her life. However, as production begins, her world begins to fall apart as reality blurs with fiction.

Always poised and synchronised, Nina is a superbly gifted dancer, but frustrates her Director, Leroy (Vincent Cassell), who seeks a more spontaneous, sexually alluring side. Initally heartbroken at her inability to channel a darker side, she finds a strange, literally biting side which manages to convince him that she can pull of the duel role as both the Black and the White Swan.
As rehearsals begin, she struggles to discover her other side, to used to a buttoned up, limited lifestyle. As well as this strain, she is troubled by the warning sides sent out by self destructive former star Beth (Winona Ryder), who has been ousted for being "too old", and also at the arrival of the more natural, carefree Lily (Mila Kunis), equally talented but far darker, acting almost as her muse. When she begins hallucinating, and is tortured by emotional stress, it becomes clear she is on the verge of destroying herself in finding the black side to her personality.

Perhaps offputting for some, the ballet element of Black Swan is, like all Aronofsky films, simple a means to an end in telling the story. Indeed, the original script was named The Understudy and it's setting was stage acting. However, the thing that sets Black Swan apart from traditional psychological thrillers is it's self-referential subtext, using the White Swan's story as a theme throughout Nina's odyssey, as well as the plot for the film. Nina's fall from sanity in her attempts to find the dark spirit is ironically not a failed effort, simply a far greater stretch of herself than anticipated. That we feel her struggle so intimately is, like The Wrestler, down to the use of often intrusive single hand held camera approach, ditching standard artistic framing in favour of audience participation. We as the viewers often feel like flies on the wall rather than distant observers.

With slight of hand, Aronofsky is also able to create a brooding, sinister aptmosphere, one that raises continuously startling imagery and common themes and leaving a question mark after every event, confrontation and conversation. It occasionally veers into the realms of disturbing, rather than simply troubling, with some moments verging on horror not thriller. Visual metaphor, once more, is hugely significant and utilsed superbly, leaving us in no doubt of the Director's origins and intentions.

Portman, waifer thin and fragile, is in brilliant form, well deserving of her Academy Award. The saga plays out through her, and she share her frustrations at not being able to find a more sensual, alluring side to herself. Painfully shy at times, and infuriatingly unable to stand on her own two feet, she is still doubtless symapthetic and you share her desperate wish to make sense of the fog around her. Cassell is his usual, flamboyant, charismatic and effective self, completely authentic as a ballet director, while Kunis perfectly represents a nemesis figure for Nina, beautiful and graceful in a completely contrasting sense, the mirrored end of the spectrum. Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder also thrive in significant supporting roles.

A dark, breathless and often claustrophobic descent into madness, Black Swan sends us on an emotional rollercoaster as we attempt to make sense of the character's world, while subtextually it is one of the most ingenious and ambiguous films of the decade.

9/10