Monday at the Movies - December 10, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Four of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, we’ll take a look at a few films that grapple with mental illness – perfect timing for those of us enduring the slings and arrows of finals week.

American Psycho (2000) – Either this movie is more fun than it ought to be, or there’s something seriously wrong with me.  Before he was Batman, Christian Bale was Patrick Bateman, yuppie investment banker by day and vicious serial killer by night.  Mary Harron’s infinitesimally gentler adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s downright brutal novel is, simply put, a hoot.  Bateman is insane, no question, and his deeds are despicable, but Bale’s trademark fascinating immersion in the role is riotous to watch, vacillating wildly between pent-up emotionlessness and manic indulgence in his homicidal tendencies.  And as a social satire of 1980s New York, American Psycho is positively brilliant, exposing the excesses and pettiness of such a superficial society without moralizing.  Instead of preaching, the film makes its satire entertaining by encouraging us to laugh at it; the deadpan seriousness with which Bateman examines a business card belies both his internalized rage and the ludicrous attention given to such minutiae.  The standout feature of this film is its ambiguity, which enchants rather than maddens the viewer; a mesmerizing interrogation scene with Willem Dafoe forces the viewer to question who knows what, an uncertainty played to the hilt by Dafoe in three different takes.  By the end, the film pays off on its repetition of the trope of mistaken identity, asking us whether any of these people really “exist” in a tangible form.  What’s not uncertain is how much fun the film manages to be, with an engrossing and star-making performance from its lead, who charms even as he twists the knife.

Black Swan (2010) – Black Swan is in many ways the dark side of American Psycho’s white swan.  Darren Aronofsky’s balance of ballet and mental illness explores in very disturbing and unflinching ways the consequences of the quest for perfection.  Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as Nina Sayers, a ballerina whose starring role in Swan Lake is slowly driving her insane; she suspects her understudy Lily (Mila Kunis) of sabotaging her work, though recurrent hallucinations make it difficult for her to discern reality from delusion.  Barbara Hershey has an underappreciated role as Nina’s controlling mother, a former ballerina and perhaps the source of her daughter’s difficulties.  Where American Psycho treated its protagonist’s insanity as exuberantly entertaining, Nina’s descent into madness is distressing and almost uncomfortable to watch; the fast-and-loose representation of reality unsettles the viewer as mirrors misbehave and strangers bear Nina’s face for fleeting frames.  Portman’s Academy Award was well-deserved, as she embodies well Nina’s fears and anxieties by giving the character a full sense of life such that we know her even before we see her dance.  Yet, even though the film is unsettling and uncomfortable, there is something poetically beautiful about it, an aesthetic exquisiteness created by the combination of Aronofsky’s deliberately arranged shots and Clint Mansell’s reworking of Tchaikovsky’s music.  There’s certainly a comparison to be made here with Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which deals with similar themes, but Black Swan is more metaphorical and more beautiful, one of 2010’s best films, to be sure.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  With the release of The Dark Knight Rises on DVD, look for an Armchair Review sometime in the near future!