Requiem for a Dream

recommended

by Sam Adams

Directed by Darren Aronofsky
An Artisan release

When it’s time for Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) to pick out a birthday present for his mother, he doesn’t ask himself what she’d like or what she needs. The question he asks is "What’s her fix?" Harry, whose mother still thinks he’s a nice Jewish boy from Coney Island, is a junkie and a drug dealer, so he’s used to seeing the world in those terms. (He tells his mother he’s "a distributor for a big importer.") But wouldn’t you know, he turns out to be right: His mother is as much an addict as he is, even if her compulsion takes a more socially acceptable form.

At first, Sara (brilliantly played by Ellen Burstyn) is just hooked on chocolates and TV — Harry’s present turns out to be a hulking new set which commands an entire corner of Sara’s apartment and towers over her like the monoliths in 2001. But when she gets a call from a weaselly telemarketer who promises her the chance to appear as a game show contestant, Sara becomes fixated on the idea of being on television. She starts crash dieting so she can fit into her favorite red dress, just in case she gets the chance to wear it on the air, and when eggs and grapefruit don’t produce fast enough results, she switches over to diet pills, unaware that she’s actually ingesting speed. Before long, she’s chomping down blue pills and green pills in ever-increasing handfuls while she waits with terrifying anxiousness for the phone to ring with the news that she’s finally been selected.

Meanwhile Harry, together with his running buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) has cooked up a plan to get "a pound of pure," a stash that will start the two of them on the road to making serious money as dealers, and allow Harry to set his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connolly) up with the clothing store of her dreams. Given the film’s title, it’s no surprise things don’t work out as planned, but what is surprising is the depths to which the characters will sink in pursuit of their dreams, pulling further away from them even as they risk everything to achieve them.

Based on Hubert Selby, Jr.’s 1978 novel and adapted for the screen by π director Darren Aronofsky (the two co-wrote the script), Requiem’s message is schematic but compelling: We are all addicts, and addiction is what keeps us from our dreams. The film opens with Harry "borrowing" his mother’s TV to pawn for drug money, and from the way the two interact, the way she hides in the closet but still slips him the key to unlock the chain that binds the TV to the wall, you can tell they’ve gone through this ritual dozens of times before. (The local pawn shop has a special register inscribed "Sara Goldfarb’s TV.") Harry’s need for drugs is obvious, immediate, thrust at you by Leto’s wire-thin frame and Matthew Libatique’s urgent camera. But Aronofsky lets the counterpart to Harry’s addiction sneak up on you slowly. It may take a while before it registers that while it’s significant that Harry habitually steals his mother’s television, it’s just as significant that she keeps getting it out of hock.

We’ve reached a point where even junkies are tired of junkie movies, and all that’s left is for filmmakers to sift through the genre’s ashes and content themselves with hipster posturing and self-referential irony. (Trainspotting, this means you.) The two-thirds excellent Jesus’ Son avoided the trap by making its protagonist’s substance abuse problem a symptom of his general social dislocation. (He didn’t need drugs to remove him from the world, because he wasn’t part of it to begin with.) Similarly, Requiem knows not to spend too much time with Harry, Marion and Tyrone; Burstyn’s character may be the least demographically desirable — and the furthest from the experience of 31-year-old Aronofsky — but it’s her harrowing ideal that defines the film. It’s not just because we’re less used to seeing elderly diet pill addicts than pretty young junkies on screen. It’s because the desperate loneliness that drives the widowed Sara holds a warped mirror up to our own solitude. Even at the height of her speed-fueled dementia, when she’s hallucinating her refrigerator trying to attack her and characters from TV materializing in her living room, Sara seems utterly, horribly familiar.

I’ve gone this far without mentioning Requiem for a Dream’s visual style because I suspect that will be all anyone else writes about, and the film is too powerfully insightful, too human to be dealt with as some cinematic curiosity. That said, Requiem looks like no movie before it, and spectacularly synthesizes recent advances in technology with a maturity that belies its director’s tender age. The film’s press kit brags that it contains more cuts — somewhere over 2000 — than any commercial feature, and whether or not that’s a trophy worth seizing, there’s no question that Requiem’s rapid-fire montage puts Aronofsky at the head of the technophile pack. But where a movie like The Matrix fetishizes technique, Requiem uses it expressively; there isn’t a moment in the film that feels gratuitous, and considering the extravagance of some of its shots, the fact that none of them fail to perform as intended is little short of miraculous.

Aronofsky’s π seemed like a movie with more ideas than execution, but the advance between the two movies is staggering, revolutionary. Aronofsky uses split screen, robotic cameras, digital effects (subtly employed) and elaborate sound design, and climaxes the film with a 15-minute montage which overlaps the characters’ simultaneous degradation to shattering effect. (It’s this montage that earned the film an inflexible NC-17 from the ratings board, though Artisan has decided to release it without a rating.) Combined with the stop-start electronic score by Clint Mansell, which relies heavily on snippets from the Kronos Quartet, the film’s cascade of imagery pitches you into a whirlpool of disorientation, a vortex of need.

Requiem for a Dream is the kind of movie whose full impact can’t be felt right away, because you leave the theater with your ears ringing and your head fit to explode. You’re not sure at first if you’ve experienced something radically new or just been put through the wringer. But Requiem isn’t a movie that’s out to jangle your nerve endings just because it can.

Still, it’s rare that a movie pushes this deep into your psyche, and it makes other films seem like wan imitations by comparison. The question is why you’d want to see a movie that offers such an unrelenting vision of wasted lives and helpless self-destruction. And on some level, the answer is because the Intensity of each character’s personal apocalypse makes us feel more alive. Put simply, it’s a rush.