A Brutalizing Foray into the Vanguard

Rating: 10/10 (10 April 2009)

I was in the seventh grade when I impulsively borrowed a VHS tape from an older classmate. I knew nothing about it. It simply looked interesting. I went home and watched it. I had no idea how to react. I felt numb. I felt truly horrified and became obsessed by the feelings this movie gave me. At first, I thought this meant hate, but I gradually found myself fascinated by the notion of seeing the film again. And I realized that if a movie can make you feel so strongly, it's a special film. I have seen it a cautious handful of times in the many years since, and it has yet to lose its effect. Incidentally, I owe a great deal of credit to this film for opening a door for me to pursue more, better, powerful films.
Much of what haunted me the first time was the performance of Ellen Burstyn. It is rare that we find movies that feature such dauntless, ballsy and absolutely frighteningly real performances. On one continuous level, she is the embodiment of so many million frail, forgotten old ladies with small worlds and big worries but simple pleasures. What gives her a savory glimmer of hope in the story is such a flight of fancy to such a normal, lonely old woman. On another continuous level, the culmination of her character's course into a nightmarish dreamscape is utterly harrowing. There is nothing to be found in the brutalizing climactic sequences that she says or does that is not excruciatingly undergone by Burstyn. Old women don't get many substantial roles in movies, but isn't Burstyn's Goldfarb the call to action for more? Rarely do we get performances this raw, unrelenting and real from anybody.
What is remarkable about this landmark gateway for the new century of American film is how emphatically director Darren Aronofsky shows the psychological conditions of his addicts. When they use, a window opens fleetingly into a world where everything is as they dream. Then it slams closed, and life is basically a scrounge for the money and drugs to open it again. Nothing else is nearly as motivating for them. Aronofsky brings a new imperativeness to the drug movie by trying to recreate, through his idiosyncratically personal approach, how his characters feel, or yearn to feel, or are scared to feel.
As this down-to-earth nightmare suddenly begins, a widowed housewife is chaining her television to the radiator. It's no use. Her son frees it, and wheels it down the street to a pawn shop. This is a typical visit, we amass. Anything in his mother's house is a conceivable begetter of cash for drugs. The son's girlfriend and best friend are both dependent on drugs as well. So is the mother: to television and sugar. We recall the actors, however remotely. Honestly, save for Marlon Wayans, I had hardly noticed the central cast in any films I'd seen previously. Or at least that's my subjective perception after seeing them in this, to which there's no comparison to the vast majority of the rest of their work, no matter how impressive. Ellen Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb is mussy and overweight in her blowzy house dresses. Her son Harry, played by Jared Leto, is bony and preoccupied. So is his girlfriend Marion, played by Jennifer Connelly. His best friend Tyrone is played by Marlon Wayans, who has minimized all the juice and nerve of his zany personage in the silly movies he's made with his brothers and is just trying to survive in a diplomatic enough way. Tyrone worries, rightly, that he's in trouble but Harry is in more. Burstyn isn't disinclined to play Sara Goldfarb entirely as a disintegrating undoing. Leto's suppurating arm, whipped by too many needles, is like a logo for his life.
Aronofsky is transfixed by the way in which the camera can be used to project how his characters see things, showing us some things and withholding others so that we are first submerged into a nonobjective abstraction and then snatched back to neutrality with the chill of the imperturbable real world. As many times as I've seen modern-day visual stylists produce new and innovative camera and editing techniques, those of Aronofsky's, which he has not recycled for his successive efforts, remain truly original and unique. As much as stylistic conventions and easier, more pleasant viewings are important for the sustenance of cinema, its survival depends on mutations and new forays into the vanguard.
Aronofsky uses extreme closeups to show drugs immersing his characters. First we see the pills, or the fix, filling the screen, because that's all the characters can think about. Then the injection, swallowing or sniffing because that obliterates the troublesome outside world. Then the pupils of their eyes dilate. All done with intense amplification of sounds. The movie was given the valuelessly ignoble NC-17 rating by the MPAA. Anyone under 17, or over, no matter how young or old, who feels like they may be inclined to dabble with drugs might want to see this movie, which plays like a virtual hell. Many from my own age group have claimed to be much less intrigued by the idea of hard drugs after seeing this film.
These sequences are done in fast-motion, to show how rapidly the drugs take effect, and how unsatisfyingly soon they wear off. The intervals flirt with hopeless discomfort. Aronofsky cuts between the mother, a prisoner of her apartment and diet pills, and the other three. Early in the film, he uses a split screen in which the space on both sides is at the disposal of the other. Sara and Harry each have half the screen, but their motions enter into each other's halves. This is an forcibly persuasive manner of showing them alone but together. In an unforgettable ending sequence, he cuts between all four major characters as they lurch toward their irrevocable journey ends.