Titanic

Rating: 10/10 (25 September 2016)

Great art brings clarity. The art itself may be about deception or confusion or disillusion, but the artist finds clarity and purpose. This is why it is so important for art to take on 'sensitive' topics. As much as the moral guardians would like to imagine that the problems of the world would vanish into thin air if they were swept under the rug, this is not the case.
We are confronted with these topics, and we contemplate them and interact with them, whether directly, indirectly, or hypothetically, but our viewpoints are small and biased, naught but ethereal pockets floating in the air, cloudy with our perspectives and shrouded by our worst features, our doubts and prejudices and nagging thoughts that we know aren't true but tag around anyway.
Great art bypasses these pockets. It is not ethereal or intangible; it is substantial and corporal, like a tower or a bridge or a skyscraper. It takes the thoughts and feelings that are impossible for us to understand by ourselves and projects them into the realm of reality. Great art's light isn't always white, but it is always bright, blinding even, blinding enough to sweep away the darkness, which is not anger or sadness or any number of unpleasant emotions, but rather ignorance and dividedness, the corrupted cloud of not knowing.
Requiem for a Dream is a film that embodies this truth more than most any I have seen. It is a film that makes order out of chaos. It does not reduce chaos to order, mind you. It takes the chaos and lays it out in the light, revealing its true nature. The impulses and choices and situations shown in this film are some of the darkest there are, but the powerful direction of Aronofsky lays them out in full color, divorcing them from the perceptions we have in our heads, demystifying them while hitting us with them full force.
If you're a lover of music, or you've at least seen Amadeus, you'd know what a requiem is: a Mass for the dead. Requiem for a Dream, thus, is a Mass for the dreams of the characters, which die throughout the film. If you know the definition of the word requiem, the end result of this film isn't be that surprising. It's not trying to be surprising. It's not trying to pull one over on you, to hit you with a twist. This is not a Nolan or Scorsese film, a flight of demented fancy.
It is a march to death, to demise, to ruin.
Generally, in film, strings are only used for dramatic scenes. Think the use of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings in the climax of Platoon. In this film they play close to the beginning of the film, as two of our main characters move a TV over the opening credits. Throughout the film, variations of that same piece come up over and over again, as do many of the film's montages and cinematic tricks.
This is not a fragile film, one that sways back and forth through its runtime. It is sturdy. It stays put. It is unbreakable. It breaks you. Empire rated this the #1 most depressing film of all time, and I find it hard to disagree. It is common in depressing pieces of literature or cinema for the characters to discuss their dreams and ambitions. In most films, the artist lets you feel, at least for a second, that these dreams are possible. This film offers no such illusions. It brushes your wishes to the side and descends into deeper and darker territory, the cuts getting faster and faster until all sense of life and hope have been lost to the unrelenting march of despair.
Some films sweep you away. This film pounds at you until you are a gray puddle of goo. But then it ends, and after one last rendition of the title theme, you hear waves and seagulls. You are free to pick yourself up and put yourself back together. Resonance pounds through your bones. And around the time you put the last piece of yourself back, you realize you have experienced one of the greatest pieces of art of all time.