Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  One movie and one book paved the way for today’s ballet psychodramatics. The movie, of course, is Michael Powell’s incomparable The Red Shoes (1948), in which Vicky Page, played by Moira Shearer, cries out, “Why do I want to dance? Why do I want to live! Because I must!” And so she dies the death, torn between her love for her reliable composer husband and her obsession with ballet and the prodigious if sinister Boris Lermontov (a libel on the prodigious but hardly sinister Diaghilev). There have been other ballet movies, but nothing like this one in its opulence and ambitions. From a slow start, The Red Shoes became a tremendous box-office hit in both England and America (in New York, it ran at a small art house for more than two years); there’s no way of estimating how many little girls demanded ballet lessons in the wake of its gorgeous melodrama.

  One of the most striking aspects of The Red Shoes is how over the decades it’s changed: not in its content, naturally, but in how we perceive it. In its early years, the 1950s, Vicky Page seemed to be the victim of the Svengali-like Lermontov, who manipulates her into abandoning her husband and domesticity in order to return—fatally—to his company to perform the Red Shoes ballet. In our more liberated day, it’s the husband who comes across as the bad guy: It’s his selfish requirements of Vicky that stand between her and her artistic destiny, and so drive her over the brink. Either way, though, she’s a victim—and victimhood is the heart of the quintessential ballet melodrama.

  The literary version of all this is Gelsey Kirkland’s notorious memoir of 1986, Dancing on My Grave. She’s the victim of everyone and everything, starting with her perfectionist father (the author of the play Tobacco Road) and featuring the tyrannical George Balanchine, whose crime lay in rigorously training her and starring her at his New York City Ballet. And then there’s her drug addiction, her self-loathing (horrible efforts to alter her looks), her eating disorders, the casual behavior of her most famous dancing and sexual partner (Baryshnikov), the drug death of her later dancing and sexual partner, Patrick Bissell, and most of all, her seething anger.

  But why blame Daddy, Mr. B, Misha, or Lermontov, when you can blame the real villain: ballet itself? If Vicky, Gelsey, and other martyred heroines had never been bitten by the ballet bug, they could have led normal, wholesome lives.

  * * *

  TIMES HAVE CHANGED, however, and although terrible things continue to plague fictionalized ballet heroines, something different and up-to-date is also taking place: Claire Robbins, the heroine of Flesh and Bone, finally refuses to succumb to abuse. Being a modern liberated young woman, she learns to take charge of her life, to be her own woman, to say no to her oppressors, from her toxic family to her toxic artistic director, a two-bit Lermontov. In fact, the last word spoken in Flesh and Bone is her defiant “No!” Her significant progress hasn’t been from corps girl to prima ballerina but from victimhood to assertion. Just in time, she’s discovered her self-worth!

  When we first encounter Claire, though, ballet is an escape route, not a transcendence. She’s climbing out of the window of the grim house in Pittsburgh in which she’s living with her father and brother—presumably they would forcibly prevent her from leaving in a more orthodox way. Well, maybe they would: Daddy is a beer-chugging invalid, raging at the universe; brother is a violent ex-marine whose relationship with Sis has been, to put it tactfully, seriously unconventional. A few years ago, Claire was an up-and-coming apprentice in a local ballet company, but she dropped out—because, as we eventually learn, she’d been inconveniently made pregnant by Bro.

  No matter. Claire hops a bus for New York, proceeds at once to an open audition at the “American Ballet Company,” and though she apparently hasn’t taken class for years, is exhausted by her bus trip, and has no particular glamour, she is immediately hired by ABC’s volatile artistic director, who decides practically on the spot that she’s the Future and dumps plans to open his new season with Giselle in favor of a cutting-edge new piece that’s to be tailor-made for her.

  This doesn’t go down well with all the other girls, who are relentlessly bitchy, and it really gets under the skin of the company’s leading ballerina—in fact, its only ballerina, so far as we can see. The very glamorous Kiira (effectively played by the former ABT dancer Irina Dvorovenko) is approaching the end of her triumphant career but—and this is the most realistic thing in the series—she’s in denial: She’s convinced that she can go on … and on. Fortunately for Kiira, when she finally has to acknowledge that the bell has tolled for her at last, she has an adoring rich husband, an assortment of past and present lovers, and her cocaine habit to cushion the fall.

  There seem to be fewer than thirty dancers at the American Ballet Company, which is nevertheless presented as a major organization. The only visible principals are Kiira (until she’s gone) and a single male (another ABT refugee, the estimable Sascha Radetsky). There’s a talented black guy in the corps who’s amusingly campy, though ruthlessly ambitious, but the rest of the corps are mostly undifferentiated.

  Only two of the girls stand out: redheaded, promiscuous, deeply insecure Mia, Claire’s roommate, who it turns out (are you ready?) is going blind; and self-assured rich girl Daphne, who buys a promotion to soloist but whose main function is to introduce Claire to the fancy strip joint where Daph enjoys performing with a pole when she’s not back in the studio practicing her fouettés. Club Anastasia is run by a charming but vicious Russian thug who happens to be in love with ballet. His favorite is Swan Lake, and he arranges to have Claire, whom he instantly recognizes as a special soul, too fine for poles, dance the famous second-act solo before a throng of rich people on his large yacht out in New York harbor. Oh—I almost forgot: There’s a mini-subplot about the Russian mafia that comes out of nowhere and disappears without a trace.

  * * *

  CLAIRE, WE’RE CONSTANTLY REMINDED, is a tremendous talent, a judgment confirmed by the cutting-edge choreographer Toni Cannava, a tall, rakish blonde who is hired to create the masterpiece that will pull the American Ballet Company out of its artistic doldrums. Yet Claire is somehow emotionally blocked. (She also has some bad habits, like self-mutilation.) She has to learn to expose her feelings. “Show the camera your marrow,” dictates artistic director Paul Grayson. “Strip yourself bare. Let it devour you.” She does her best, but even after Paul flicks his member at her to make his point, men (always excepting Brother Bryan) just don’t get through to her.

  Throughout the series we get to watch ABC rehearsing, and eventually performing, Balanchine’s Rubies (a touch of class), but the focus is on the new ballet Toni Cannava is creating. It’s called Dakini, a Tibetan Buddhist manifestation of some kind of spiritual progress (if I understand its Wikipedia entry), and somehow it mirrors Claire’s progress from victimhood to womanhood. The actual choreography is by the brilliant ex-dancer Ethan Stiefel, but I’m afraid it’s the usual crummy business of lifts, lifts, lifts: Up Claire goes, down Claire comes. It’s about as cutting-edge as celery, and next to Rubies looks pathetically reductive.

  It would be easy, and fun, to go through Flesh and Bone and laugh at all the blunders and misrepresentations, but I’ll let one stand for all. Suddenly, in a fit of pique—his natural state—artistic director Grayson turns on one of the corps girls, shrieking the equivalent of “You’re fired! Get out of here!” and the poor girl slinks off, never to reappear. Grayson has presumably internalized Donald Trump’s management techniques from The Apprentice, but apparently neither he nor anyone else connected to Flesh and Bone has ever heard of contracts and unions.

  Sarah Hay, a pleasing if not exceptional American dancer, was “discovered” to play Claire, and at the start there was a fuss about her cleavage, considered by some as excessive for a ballerina. But she stuck to her guns, and I’m certainly not complaining. Hay is perfectly adequate as both a dancer and an actress—it’s not her fault that she’s hardly the incomparable performer she’s meant to be.

  She even works convincingly with the series’s remaining major (and m
ost irritating) character, Romeo, a homeless literary schizophrenic, played by Damon Herriman, who hangs out at the brownstone where Claire and Mia live, benignly watching over them. Claire responds to his kindness, little knowing that at the very moment of her overwhelming triumph in Dakini, while the audience is standingly ovating, Romeo is stabbing Brother Bryan to death in Central Park. You may ask yourself why he’s wearing a coat he’s patiently fashioned for himself out of bottle caps. Just don’t ask me.

  All this plot—plus a lot of gratuitous sex (Bryan humping Mia, but only after tying her up; Paul humping his cute ethnic rentboy)—emphasizes the fact that Flesh and Bone is pure soap opera, masquerading as, or aspiring to be, an illuminating look at the world of ballet. The obvious comparison is to the award-winning movie Black Swan (2010), a confused psychodrama about deeply disturbed characters in a semi-surreal world. In a word, Flesh and Bone is merely ridiculous; Black Swan is inflated, arty pretension. Given the choice, I’d go the soap opera route any day. Besides, it’s fun watching Dvorovenko go to town in Rubies. In soap opera as in real life, Balanchine comes off best.

  The New York Review of Books

  JANUARY 14, 2016

  A Star on Pointe

  BLACK SWAN

  SO MUCH IS AWFUL about the blood-and-tutu psychodrama Black Swan that I perversely want to start with what’s good about it. It really tries to be honest about what life is like for ballet dancers (female ones, that is; the guys are barely discernible in the movie’s fictional ballet company). We see how hard the girls work, how they long for better roles, how they endure the physical pain that’s an unavoidable component of what they do. And its star, Natalie Portman, is utterly game: Having had ballet training as a young girl, she looks plausible, even if there is nothing in the dancing she performs here (when her body double isn’t doing the tough stuff) that proclaims her as particularly talented.

  She’s very pretty, of course, and her pale complexion, thin body, and one-note intensity suffice to give her a ballerina look. That her voice is tiny and monotonous isn’t a problem—dancers don’t have to sound like Sarah Bernhardt. That her acting is monotonous is a problem—but this isn’t a movie that depends on acting of any depth; it’s about shocking the audience, not persuading it.

  What really matters is that Black Swan deploys and exaggerates all the clichés of earlier ballet movies, especially The Red Shoes, another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal. The heroine of Michael Powell’s classic suffers because she’s torn between Life and Art. The heroine of Black Swan suffers because she has a destructive ballet mother (as if this were unique), because she has lesbian impulses (they emerge in one of her psycho-fantasies), and because she is frigid—a serious no-no to male screenwriters and directors, who seem to find frigidity personally offensive. Clearly, she has to die.

  Before she does, however, the company’s impresario-choreographer (Vincent Cassel) does his best to unfreeze her, and when that doesn’t work, he sends her home to masturbate—no doubt a tactic he learned from Balanchine and Ashton. Still game, she follows orders, but no go.

  * * *

  BLOOD IS THE LEITMOTIF of Black Swan. It’s everywhere, beginning with Nina’s skin—stigmata of some sort on her back; seeping from her self-mutilations. It pools out from beneath a closed door behind which, in one of her nightmare fantasies, she’s stuffed the body of the friend/rival whom she’s offed in a moment of irritation. And of course, at the grand climax of the film and of the “perfect” performance of Swan Lake on which the film centers, it leaks out of her midsection as her Odette impales herself and leaps to her watery doom. It’s so unfair—and so unrealistic: By killing herself, Nina misses out on her curtain calls.

  Natalie Portman in Black Swan

  So Black Swan is Grand Guignol with pretensions to class, and audiences are eating it up. Which wouldn’t matter if it weren’t recapitulating all the old, ugly misrepresentations about ballet. Dance is about suffering. Art is inevitably linked to madness. (Nina’s predecessor, forced to retire, is another self-slasher.) You have to become a monster to succeed—or sleep with the boss. And to be an artist you have to feel … to live; talent and hard work aren’t enough. Get out there, Nina, and have a drink, have some pills, have some sex. Throw those stuffed animals out of your bedroom. Then get up on that stage for one perfect performance and … curtains!

  What did ballet ever do to deserve this?

  Black Swan does what Hollywood movies have always done—it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with The Wrestler, only with a prettier protagonist. (Mickey Rourke in a tutu is something I’d like to see.) The advance hype has been relentless. Some of the acting—notably Mila Kunis as Nina’s nemesis—is a lot of fun. Portman, aiming for the Oscar rather than fun, is good enough. Why is it all so dispiriting? And are deluded ballet parents around the country going to expose their little darlings to this sadomasochistic trip? There are going to be tears.

  The New York Observer

  DECEMBER 7, 2010

  Brilliant, Touching, Tough

  MARY ASTOR

  LUCILE VASCONCELLOS LANGHANKE was born in 1906. “Mary Astor” was born in 1921—that was the name that went up in lights for the first time, at Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater, where, not yet sixteen, she was playing in a short film called The Beggar Maid. Soon her Madonna-like face was spotted in a fan magazine by the great John Barrymore and she was commandeered by him to play his love interest in Beau Brummel—as well as the (temporary) love of his life, and maybe the greatest love of hers. She missed out on the chance to play Mrs. Ahab to his Captain in The Sea Beast, but they were back together in Don Juan, the real first movie to include sound, even if it was only background music. Equally prestigious: she was Dolores de Muro, Douglas Fairbanks’s love object, in Don Q, Son of Zorro.

  Astor, after nearly forty feature-length silents, made the transition to talkies, although for a long time they were mostly junkies—Ladies Love Brutes, The Sin Ship—and while she showed no extraordinary talent, her astounding beauty and impeccable elocution kept her on the screen, and in the chips, until better roles started coming her way: with Ann Harding in the first version of Holiday; with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust. Then, in 1936, after a series of calamities like The Case of the Howling Dog and Red Hot Tires, she was featured in her finest role to date: as the noble Edith Cortright, together with Ruth Chatterton and Walter Huston, in William Wyler’s Dodsworth. It was being filmed while she was also featuring in the greatest Hollywood scandal of the decade: the trial for custody of her daughter, which lasted for weeks and had to be conducted at night, since you couldn’t expect a major studio to shut down filming during the day for a mere court case.

  Among the movies to come: The Prisoner of Zenda, Midnight (she’s married, ritzily, to Barrymore), Brigham Young (she’s the great man’s first wife), The Great Lie with Bette Davis, for which she won the supporting actress Oscar for playing a selfish concert pianist with a glamorous up-sweep hairdo who gives her baby away for the sake of her career. Then her greatest role—as the ultra-noir Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon—and on to the man-hungry “Princess” who ends up with Joel McCrae’s identical twin in Preston Sturges’s glorious The Palm Beach Story, then soaked to the skin (along with Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall) in John Ford’s The Hurricane.

  And then in 1944, at the age of thirty-eight—as she recounts dolefully in her two excellent memoirs, My Story and A Life on Film—she begins a long string of mothers: first (and best), Judy Garland’s in Meet Me in St. Louis; then Gloria Grahame’s, Dorothy McGuire’s, Elizabeth Taylor’s, Esther Williams’s, Janet Leigh’s; then Taylor and Leigh’s again, plus Margaret O’Brien and June Allyson’s, as Marmee in the 1949 Little Women; and on and on. Mercifully, it was a cameo in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte—as a murderess, not a mother—that, in 1964, ende
d her forty-three years on the big screen.

  * * *

  ASTOR NEVER MADE A FLASHY COMEBACK because until her retirement she had never been far away. But now, thirty years after her death, she’s back with a bang, thanks to Edward Sorel’s endearing tribute to her, Mary Astor’s Purple Diary, told in throbbing words and spectacular color. (Forget that the notorious diary was written in brown, not purple, ink; the press would have its way.)

  The diary—she’d been keeping one since girlhood—purportedly revealed not only details of her torrid affair with the playwright George S. Kaufman but accounts of her affairs with countless other men, many of them top stars of the screen, whose sexual powers she was said to have rated and whose careers (and marriages) would have been destroyed if the news got out in those days of the strict Hays Code. Her ex-husband, whom she was challenging in court, had paid to have the purple pages snatched from her locked desk and had blackmailed her with them to gain total custody of their daughter, Marylyn. But now, in 1936, Mary had decided to fight back at the risk of her own career: Mother love came first, a standard Hollywood trope, though in this case real life proved far more turbulent than it does in your standard weeper.

  Edward Sorel’s Mary Astor

  A few pages from the diary were leaked to the press, the more lurid ones forged. The court battle raged on and on, the story dominating the front pages not only of the tabloids but of the Los Angeles and New York Times as Mary, demurely dressed, showed up in court day after day after filming had ended. Eventually, Judge Goodwin (“Goodie”) Knight—who would go on to become governor of California—shut the circus down, sequestered the diaries, and, based on what he believed to be best for four-year-old Marylyn, essentially turned her over to her mother. Kaufman slunk out of town rather than be subpoenaed, scurrying home to New York and his open marriage; Marylyn’s daddy, a fashionable gynecologist, went back to his own multiple affairs, one of them almost certainly a bigamous marriage; and both Dodsworth and Mary’s career flourished. To everyone’s relief, the far greater scandal surrounding the abdication of Edward VIII for “the woman I love” soon replaced the purple diaries as Subject Number One.