Soulless Trash

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2001)

I will point out that this review does contain what might be considered spoilers, although this raises the obvious question of whether there is even anything in A Requiem For a Dream which could be further spoiled. Not unlike Tarsem's "The Cell," this over-baked melodrama's barrage of fancy visuals do nothing to hide the fact that it offers absolutely nothing new in the way of story-telling or characterization, and is at its core morally bankrupt. In terms of acting and character development, despite any hype you may have heard, the fact is that Requiem's characters are familiar movie cliches, and not very well-acted cliches at that (unless overly thick accents and histrionics are what pass for acting these days). As a realistic portrait of drug use, Requiem fails miserably. Arnofsky should have taken a cue from Alex Cox's "Sid and Nancy": only one hyper-stylized scene per drug drama, thank you. Anything more and the movie's sense of realism suffers, and what you have left is no longer a believable world populated with sympathetic characters, but merely elaborate set pieces to satisfy the director's ego. Not only does Requiem not work in any way as a gritty urban document, but its plot elements are so weak that as an anti-drug parable it is useless as well. Ellen Burstyn descends into an amphetamine-induced hysteria that is too maudlin for anything other than a parody. Can we at least hope that Requiem is the last movie to use the "smeared lipstick as sign of psychosis" convention? Jared Leto's losing an arm is not so much a consequence of his drug use but of stupidity; people can get infections from many things besides drugs after all. Most humans with an IQ of educable or above would have seen a doctor a bit sooner. Oh well, it's his arm. Jennifer Connelly's circumstances are even more absurd. Desperate for drugs, she is "forced" to sleep with "Big Tim"(John Carpenter veteran Keith David). And of course as everyone knows, after making it with a black man it is just one small step before you're having greased-up-on-all-fours-lesbian-sex for the amusement of rich white guys in suits. The idea that a woman like Connelly had no alternative other than performing the most humiliating, debasing public sex acts in order to make money is so laughable that no one can possibly sympathize with her situation. Since Requiem founders as both slice-of-life genre movie and cautionary tale, the only reason it has left for its disturbing visuals is to be an exercise in excess. This film's transparent purpose, in the end, is merely to wallow in its own prurience. I give Requiem For a Dream one star out of... oh I don't know... it doesn't really matter does it? Any scale of five or greater will do __