Bravura film-making - genius all around ; superbly acted, adapted and conceived on all counts - one of 2000's best films; in a word: harrowing

Rating: Null/10 (23 July 2004)

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) **** Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans, Christopher McDonald, Louise Lasser, Keith David, Sean Gullette, Dylan Baker. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's sophomore film endeavor and adaptation of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s cult novel (co-scripting the screenplay with the novelist) is in a word: harrowing. Brilliantly realized with state-of-the art film editing (kudos to cutter Jay Rabinowitz) and photographed with acrobatic elan and verve by cinematographer Matthew Libatique. Drug addiction is the central focused theme between junkie Leto (in a surprising display of low-key sublime perfection), his aspiring fashion designer girlfriend Connelly (ditto for the sexy actress) and his partner in crime Wayans (in his first dramatic turn) who conspire to score some pure heroin to make their dreams come true. But it is hands-down Burstyn's film in a virtuoso Oscar caliber performance (arguably the career defining one) as Leto's doomed, widowed mother in her trappings of her Coney Island (a fine metaphor of what was once a wonderland now a weed choked wasteland) apartment whose ritualistic watching of a frenzied TV infomercial has visions in her head of being on the show leading her to take prescription uppers to lose weight with only her sanity clearly dwindling away. Her genuinely moving and convincing flesh and rotting bones performance eats at the heart and is truly wrenching to watch her downward spiral into utter madness. Depressing and at times shocking to watch the horrors unfold until its chilling, nightmarish climax the film succeeds in displaying just how unerotic or glamorous the subject matter has been perceived and skillfully ricocheting its fast-cut of fixing the drugs makes it even more resonant. One for the film vaults: Leto's sudden discovery and confrontation with Burstyn that her drug intake is on a path to self-destruction is a thing of brutal beauty in her long-standing close up confessing to her son just how meaningless her life is; priceless. One of the millennium's best films and the year's bar none.