Any time anyone asks me who is my favorite movie director, which is never, I default to Darren Aronofsky. We will get into my love for Black Swan, but I was vibing with his movies long before that. On my latest rewatch of all of them, I cried during 5 of the 8, and I insist that 6 of the 8 are great movies. And even the 2 I can't really call great, I will still defend because they have their merits. Anyway, here is my complete review of Aronofsky's movies. Let's read and watch and cry.
PI (1998) - Why No One Should Have to Take Math
I really didn't want to take math my senior year of high school. I wanted to take art instead. That did not stand, and I was really, really bad at pre-calc, because I'm really, really bad at math.
This movie taught me that math can be bad. I am vindicated. This was not the first movie of Aronofsky's that I saw. That will come later. I saw this movie in college when my roommate's boyfriend insisted we watch it. At the end, he said, "Mandie, put your jaw back on" because I was so shocked they went there.
There is a lot going on in this movie, and it sets up a lot of themes he'll continue to return to. The quest for something elusive that will make everything make sense, or make everything right. The not-so-comforting religion presence. The unreliable POV character.
Our unreliable mathematician POV character happens to find a number that corresponds with the unspeakable name of God and can be used to control the world. When I first saw Pi, I had read part of "Stories of Your Life and Others" (the short story compilation that inspired the movie Arrival). In one of the short stories, the impact of discovering all the names of God is that the universe ends. The stars go out one by one. This is a recurring theme for Aronofsky, that God exists but wants to continue to be elusive.
I won't ruin the ending of this movie, but maybe not a great date night one. But if you ever get a hankerin to watch something on March 14.
Requiem for a Dream (2000) - My So-Called Emo Life
What continues to be elusive in this movie, but could solve all problems? It's an appearance in a late-night infomercial.
I rented this movie from the video store in the small town I grew up in. I was technically not old enough to rent it, but I sure did. And, I've watched it three times. It is a BRILLIANT though completely gutting movie.
What I didn't realize the first time around is that this movie is not really about Jared Leto's Harry. It's about Sara. Ellen Burstyn was rightfully nominated for multiple awards for her role. And this introduces another huge theme in Aronofsky films - parents making their sons or daughters their everything, their perfection, their last hope. A lot more to come on that later.
The Fountain (2006) - Darren Aronofsky's Sucker Punch
What continues to be elusive in this movie is a magic tree.
I really liked this movie when I randomly rented it one night when it first came out on video. Upon rewatching it, I realized it doesn't really land. And reminds me of Sucker Punch, which was as critically panned as this movie was, but back in the day, I liked both movies.
Both movies deal with alternate realities, going across space and time. I'm not going to give away the ending of this movie either, but I will say Hugh Jackman really brings it. I was never a big fan until he guest starred on the Poorhouse Rock episode of The Simpsons, but I did refer to him previously as one of the three people who were trying in Les Miserables. And boy, he tried. His performance is the best part of the movie. His costar Rachel Weisz ultimately left me a little cold, but why would the most depressing director of all time cast someone from the beloved family franchise The Mummy? Wait. More on that later. Also the Les Miserables stuff.
The Wrestler (2008) - The Whale 1.0
The Wrestler and Black Swan and The Whale feature certain similarities. All three movies were acclaimed, were not religious as most of Aronofsky's other movies were, were highly focused on an unhealthy parent/child relationship, and featured the main character taking a leap (a literal leap) that you are not sure he/she will survive.
How can I talk about this movie without talking about The Whale? I really can't. So I'm just going to compare them.
Both of them are movies about men who have a deep sense of humanity, heart problems, an estranged daughter, and a close female friend. The main difference between The Wrestler's Randy and The Whale's Charlie is that Randy desires to be loved by anyone, by everyone, whereas Charlie's primary motivation is to believe his daughter is awesome and give her the world. Randy does not seem haunted as much by the fact that he left his family until a stripper named Pam mentions, don't you have a kid, and he decides to reconnect with her, which he botches.
But even though both of these are movies featuring a man trying to redeem himself to his daughter, neither of them are really about the father-daughter relationship. While the crux of The Whale is Charlie's toxic friendship with Liz, the crux of The Wrestler is Randy's overall struggle to be loved. By Pam, by his daughter, by the crowd, by the world. The wrestler is also a cautionary tale about the cost of fame, and how when your star begins to fade it can leave a deficit in your need for love and attention that you can never overcome.
Black Swan (2010) - Natalie Portman Is a Chameleon
I cannot express coherently how much I love this movie. This is one of four movies in the world that I could watch back to back endlessly without tiring of it. But, okay, unbiased review.
The star of this movie is, in my opinion, the soundtrack. It's used so masterfully. The last 20 minutes of the movie are better than the entirety of most movies I've seen and a lot of that is owed to the soundtrack.
But, now, let us go into the human performances in the movie. They are all perfect, but the undeniable star is Natalie Portman. Not only is she the main character, Nina, but at several points, her face is imposed on other characters' faces, especially in scenes involving sex or violence. Which makes sense, since she's so repressed that she's basically a 27-year-old child. The face changing works so well that it brings up the question: can Natalie Portman look like anyone?
There's a precedent for this. During the filming of The Phantom Menace, where Natalie Portman played Queen Amidala and Keira Knightley played her double, when the two were in makeup Natalie's parents could not tell them apart. Also, while filming V for Vendetta, Natalie Portman was reading a book called Cloud Atlas. And she pitched to the Wachowskis that Cloud Atlas should be a movie, and that she should play Sonmi. The movie got made (AND IT IS MY FAVORITE ENGLISH LANGUAGE MOVIE OF ALL TIME) but Natalie did not get cast.
Why did she want that role? Because she is a chameleon. Cloud Atlas is a movie that has six different timelines and the same cast in each timeline. Not only did she want to be in a movie where she'd play multiple characters, but she wanted to play Sonmi, a replicant who works in a cafe where "all the waitresses have the same face." I do not doubt that she would have been very good in that role, or all six roles she would have gotten in that movie, but the directors chose to have the Sonmi storyline stay in Asia, as it was in the book, so there was not a restaurant staffed entirely by Natalie Portman look-alikes. Would the movie have been better if she had been cast? Well, it would be less controversial for sure because Jim Sturgess wouldn't have had to look Asian, but Doona Bae was incredible in all of her multiple roles in this movie. But this isn't about Cloud Atlas. It's about Black Swan.
While Requiem features multiple POV characters, and The Wrestler is shot almost documentary-style, Nina is our only POV character in Black Swan, and you're going on a journey with her. There are no scenes she's not in, and you're left wondering (even I am, and I've seen this movie so many times) how much of the movie actually just happened in her mind. The scene where Nina realizes she is losing her mind, starts to break down, and then continues to put on her makeup and plaster a smile, is the best movie scene of all time and has given me more inspiration than I'd like to admit. Go get that Oscar, Natalie.
Then we have Mila Kunis. The mostly-imagined? Completely-imagined? Rival, Lily. I may be biased because of the years of joy she's brought me on Family Guy, but I don't think anyone else could have pulled off the role of Lily. With her big, heavily made-up eyes and her "I don't give no ****s" attitude, she draws the eye of everyone in the cast and becomes an obsession for Nina. Mila's performances always seem to have an "I have nothing to lose" feel to them, even in Bad Moms, where she wasn't actually a bad mom. Maybe because people tell her "Shut up, Meg" too much. I've read a Reddit post that speculates none of the scenes where Nina and Lily were alone together actually happens; they were just in Nina's head. Possible. But there's something else I'd want clarified more. Which brings me to
Winona Ryder in a comeback role as Beth. Winona took a hiatus from acting after a shoplifting scandal, and upon returning, she had aged out of the roles she was accustomed to playing. So how ironic that she would make her comeback as a ballerina who has aged out of her career and is being replaced by the likes of Nina and Lily? And nails the role. The savagery in her voice when she accuses Nina of stealing her things or when she stabs herself in the face with a nail file and says "I'm nothing, nothing." But. Here is the question I will ask Aronofsky, my one question, if I ever meet him. What are we supposed to believe happened in Beth's hospital room????? Nina flees when Beth is stabbing herself in the face, but Nina is already completely unhinged at this point, and when she gets to the elevator, she drops a bloody nail file on the floor. I guess we have to believe ... she stabbed Beth ... or stabbed herself ... yeah, I want answers.
Then we have Barbara Hershey, the overbearing mother who lives through her daughter in a scary way. She was an aspiring ballerina until she had a mistake (Nina) and now their relationship is dangerously codependent (more on dangerously codependent relationships later). In the final scene, when you focus on her face in the audience (if she was actually there - some people contend a lot of Nina's mother scenes were in Nina's mind), you can tell she was the only person there who knew what was going on. Maybe had lived it.
And finally there's the ballet director, Vincent Cassel. Our bad guy. But, like, all the other characters, he has some ambiguity. He is the character who tells an already self-destructive young woman that all that's standing in her way is herself, but his seduction of Nina could be interpreted as trying to get the best performance out of her, while her passionately kissing him toward the end of the movie seems more of a power play than anything.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that theater people are nuts, and this is Aronofsky's best movie.
Noah (2014) - Hermione Saves Mankind (who else would)
In the era of movies such as God's Not Dead, we get a movie about Noah that is fairly true to the source material. Almost to a fault (we have to see Russell Crowe's butt). I mean, Noah's Ark is a kids' story. My sister and I had a Noah's Ark puzzle when we were kids. But, do kids ever think about the fact that Noah was saving all the animals, but blithely letting the humans die?
Noah has three sons, and I think it's mentioned they had wives in the Bible, so humanity was going to go on. But this movie drives home the fact that Noah was told humanity had to die and his only purpose was to take care of the animals and then also die. Only one of his sons has a wife in this version. Her name is Ila, and she is barren, so she is allowed to get on the ark. The problem is, Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah (best part of this movie) heals her barrenness just before the flood hits.
Don't get me wrong, this is definitely a movie worth watching, and mainly for the visuals. You've got stunning landscapes, you've got a lot of CGI animals, you've got rock monsters, it's a good time. But it's also one of your first forays into one of the Harry Potter kids doing a grown-up role.
That brings me to something I will return to in a later movie in this post. Franchise child stars.
Let's face it, the Harry Potter kids are always going to be called by the role they played, not their actual name. Daniel Radcliffe, after the series ended, did a pretty vanilla horror movie but he was grown up and had a kid in the movie, and I remember thinking, Harry Potter has kids? And he also did a ton of edgy stuff (I saw Horns, I didn't see the one where he was a farting corpse). But he's still always going to be our favorite boy wizard. For example, he had a run in Equus, a play where he gets nude. In an episode of Family Guy, Brian is attempting to impress Lois by telling her he's an equestrian.
Brian: I've always been an Equus
Lois: The play with Harry Potter's penis?
My best friend is a big Harry Potter fan and refuses to watch any of Daniel Radcliffe's other stuff.
Emma Watson, likewise, got some crap for her role in Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is pretty tame compared to the stuff Daniel did, because she has to keep being our darling girl wizard. She's always going to be Hermione. I loved her cameo in This Is the End (which she got because Daniel Radcliffe turned it down) where she has a violent outburst, which the other characters recount as "Hermione just stole all our ****."
Did she have the range to play Ila, arguably the most pivotal character in this movie? No. Was this the worst instance of casting a young actor from a popular franchise? No. We'll get to that later. In fact, I think casting a beloved child icon in this role kind of gave the movie more emotional impact. "Oh no! Maximus is going to kill Hermione Granger's babies!!!" We all feel the feels.
The third Harry Potter kid, the Ron guy, I don't think did a whole lot, he was in a movie about farts that my sister likes but I will not watch, wait, what was I talking about? Oh. Noah.
Yes. Rock monsters. Good times. Hermione saves humankind. I guess Hannibal Lecter helped too. Bet you never thought you'd read that sentence.
Mother! (2017) - What a Fever Dream
Remember that movie Noah? Did you ever wonder what would happen if you threw Noah and a bunch of drugs into a blender?
That mind-bending smoothie is the movie mother! (it has to be in lowercase, we'll get to that), a movie that Aronofsky wrote over the span of five days when he got really mad about environmental issues, and a movie that managed the daunting task of surpassing The Fountain as his worst received movie ever.
So, what is mother! about? The thing is, I'm going to have to spoil a lot about this movie if I'm going to talk about it. So please skip to the next movie if you think you might want to see this one ... but also, I think you might get MORE out of this movie if you didn't go in blind like I did.
I'd heard that a lot of people walked out of this movie, but one of my friends told me that I should still watch it and I should go in blind. So I did. The first half of the movie, I was really into it. Was this a psychological thriller? Is J-Law's husband poisoning her? Is the house haunted? Then more and more people started showing up at the unnamed couple's house, and everything escalated insanely, and I didn't know what I was watching anymore.
I asked my friend afterwards, "What was that?"
He said, "You didn't realize it was a biblical allegory?"
So, Jennifer Lawrence can do anything, right? People who'd read The Hunger Games didn't like at first that she wasn't a tiny 18-year-old who needed them to take care of her emaciation and excessive body hair before putting her in the Games, like she was described in the book. But she won our hearts with her performance.
People who'd read Silver Linings Playbook, which might only be me, were surprised by her casting as a character who was supposed to be 40-something, have PTSD, and be a beautiful dancer. She was kind of the opposite of all of those things in the movie. And won a deserved Oscar.
In mother! she plays ... Earth. And even though her performance is perfectly cromulent, I have to say this is the messiest of all of Aronofsky's movies.
Should I have known this was a Biblical allegory? Maybe if I paid attention to the credits. You find out that none of the characters have names. The husband's name is Him, and he's the only one who even gets a capital letter. The movie is the story of God letting humans into paradise and destroying mother Earth. And it's not really that subtle of an allegory, but a lot of people, myself included, really didn't get it. Noah delivers the message that humans are destroying a pure Earth, but, I mean, the movie is called Noah. This movie has the same message, but almost goes out of its way to be obscure.
Anyways, if you watch mother!, I might want a chaser. Like, mother! followed by Dumb and Dumber might be a well-balanced evening.
The Whale (2022) - The Wrestler 2.0
So we've come to this. The movie that gutted me the most out of any on this list.
Brendan Fraser, like Winona Ryder, had been a niche darling at some point, in movies like The Mummy and Blast from the Past. And, like Winona Ryder, he disappeared from the spotlight for a while and came back to play a self-destructive person in an Aronofsky movie.
I already kind of covered this movie when I was talking about The Wrestler, but the relationship between Fraser's Charlie and Hong Chau's Liz is the soul of this movie, and tears me apart because I relate to both characters and they are played so well. I cried when I saw this movie in the theater, and when re-watching at home, I knew the first time they appear together in the movie that I was going to cry again.
The connection between Charlie and Liz is that Charlie left his family for Liz's brother, who is now dead. After losing the love of his life, Charlie is steadily working on eating himself to death, while Liz, a nurse, has appointed herself his caretaker and also his best friend. The thing is, you can't always be both. If you watch the clip they showed when Hong Chau was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, you might think she's the hero of the story. She's not. No one is. She's damaged and flawed, like he is. When she insists that she is the only person who can save him, she's being possessive, not heroic. She's not trying to get him to the hospital, she's buying him sandwiches, because she loves him and wants him to be completely dependent on her, and knows if she didn't enable him she might lose him like she lost her brother.
I would have loved to see Hong Chau win, but that Oscar year was all about Everything Everywhere All at Once (a much better version of The Fountain).
Unfortunately, other than the two main characters, no one is very memorable. The daughter (one of the Stranger Things kids), the missionary, the ex wife who they didn't even really need to include in the movie, they're all one-note and lazy. I'd said maybe Emma Watson didn't have the range to play Ila, but Sadie Sink, despite having been in Stranger Things, which makes her an A-lister I guess, is just ... robotic in this. I can't fault Sadie too much because I also don't think the character was written that well. Her dad abandoned her and her mother hates her, but she never really exudes that pain throughout the movie, she's just ... a monotone sociopath. They could have done so much more with her.
Anyway, what can I say other than Aronofsky's movies are a land of contrast.
