Country: U.S.A.
Genre(s): Drama
Director: Darren
Aronofsky
Cast: Jared Leto /
Ellen Burstyn / Jennifer Connelly
Plot
Four people, feeling
unable to fulfill their deepest desires, comfort themselves with drugs, losing
themselves and each other to their addictions.
What I Liked
I’m pretty well
convinced that Darren Aronofsky can do no wrong. Of course, I’ve yet to see “The Fountain,”
but I’ve seen all of his other movies.
Each and every one of them is among the most unforgettable films I’ve
ever seen. On an emotional level, “Requiem
for a Dream” is the most devastating of them all. It’s about as repulsive as staring into a
public port-a-potty toilet for two hours, and yet it is somehow simultaneously
a thing of absolutely beauty.
The toilet is of
course the subject matter: likable human beings destroying themselves on every
level for no good reason. Aronofsky puts
the grimy, nauseating reality of addiction on display through the use of surrealism. The slow motion, the fast motion, the
off-kilter camera angles, the dizzy point-of-view shots, the fast cutting, the
uncomfortable close-ups, they’re all there not just to show off but to drive
home the disjointed, nightmarish experience of the characters.
And that’s the beauty
of it. In Aronofsky we have a master of
his craft, still very young when this movie was made, who has assembled a
near-perfect portrait of that thing all Americans are trained to either deny or
despise: failure. In his hands, it’s all so wonderfully rendered, so painfully poignant, that one can’t help but admire the grotesque beauty. Each of the film’s
four protagonists is after some image of what we are all supposed to want:
family, respect, success, and love. It
is their relatable pursuit of these supposedly all-American ideals that is most
heart-breaking as it leads each of them into a personal Hell. After all, each of us has our own thing too, whether it's drugs, alcohol, sex, television, junk food, violence, porn, nicotine, caffeine, energy drinks, crime, or whatever else is your fix. You just haven't let it destroy you. Yet.
Even forgetting
Aronofsky, there are still the performances to admire. As though they are participating in a
painstakingly refined symphony orchestra, everyone from the four leads to the
extras strike the perfect notes at the perfect time. Hardly a second goes by where a well-known
film star isn’t on the screen; and yet never once does the star power of the
actors distract one from believing that the characters are very real people. But first and foremost should be mentioned
Ellen Burstyn, who turns in one of the most astounding performances of the last
decade and yet somehow got passed over at the Oscars for…Julia Roberts. And that, people, is why I don’t watch the
Academy Awards.
Not-so-incidentally,
the novel by Hubert Selby, Jr. (who co-wrote the film) is well worth a read.
What I Didn’t Like
I’ve seen “Requiem
for a Dream” several times; I own it; It’s one of the most movie pictures I’ve
ever seen. Here’s the thing,
though. I can’t watch it any more often
than once every five years. I can
literally still remember the first time I saw it, about two or three years
after it came out. After it ended I had
to leave my apartment just to move around and get the anxiety and depression
out of my brain. It’s that goddamn
powerful.
If you do decide to
put this one on, hide the sleeping pills, sharp objects, and rope from
yourself. You’ve been warned.
Most Memorable Scene
Although Ellen
Burstyn deservedly gets most of the kudos of all the actors in the film,
Jennifer Connelly also turns gives a sorely underrated performance. Her character, Marion, is nowhere near as
manic as Burstyn’s Sara, which means Connelly’s role calls for more subtlety, a
trait at which she has proven more than adept since her beginnings as a child
actress (See “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Really, see it.). Marion’s
unravelling is the slowest of them all and at first we might not pay attention
to how badly she is suffering, when compared with the others. That is until her final scene in the
movie. She doesn’t speak a line, but her
face, as beautiful as it is, becomes difficult to look at amid the ugliness of
her torture and the heartbreaking performance of Jennifer Connelly.
My Rating: 5 out of 5
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