I saw this movie tonight, and I’m still puzzling out what I think of it.

In one light, the film is an interesting attempt to an old fable (Swan Lake) from an old medium (Ballet) and remix it all sexy for the digital age. For that I give the director great credit. He also does as good a job as I’ve ever seen of walking the audience step by step through a character’s complete psychotic break.

In the light I’m seeing it in right now, however, it’s a pedantic and slow-moving film that takes a very small message and drives it into your brain with a power drill. Fables are for children, and children tolerate (maybe even require) a great deal more repetition than I’m willing to stand. Swan Lake works as a ballet because the abstract medium of wordless dance confronts the story only obliquely. In “Black Swan”, every tile in the long line of plot dominoes is obvious to the point of anticlimax. If you’re the kind of person who can decipher a Law and Order episode, you’ll see every plot twist in this film coming down 6th Avenue in a cab. Worse, there’s a character who functions as a sort of pervy Jiminy Cricket – not one line of his dialog isn’t meant to remind us where we are and where we’re going.

Since this movie comes from the director of “Pi”, I want to love it. I think when he’s working with strong material, he brings real visual elan and creative force to the screen. When the material is weaker, like “The Fountain”, the affectations of his style tend to bury the meaning and the performances.

“Black Swan” will get Oscar attention, if only because the leads dieted down to ballerina size and took months and months to learn to give convincing balletic performances. Everyone knows that the Academy eats that stuff up. If you’re the kind of person who likes to have seen all the Best Picture nominees before sitting down to watch the Oscars, then I guess you have to see it. I might gnaw on it overnight and feel the need to revise, but at this moment it’s hard for me to recommend it – it feels like a very pretty and well-intended misfire.

Side note: There is a surprising and frankly horrifying amount of finger/nail/cuticle related violence in this film. I squirmed a lot more watching those bits than I have in many, many movies. I’m not exactly sure why, but I would rather watch James Franco hack off his arm than see Natalie Portman tear a hangnail off down to the second knuckle. Just a bit too real, somehow.