Beautiful, brilliant and kinda boring

Rating: 1/10 (15 November 2001)

I really wanted to like this movie. I loved Pi and had been looking forward to see what (writer/director) Darren Aronofsky would come up with next. And for a while I was completely blown away by "Requiem". The acting was wonderful and the cinematography and editing were absolutely incredible - kinetic, musical and truly unique. Given it's stunning first hour, it should have been a great film. But a thread of truly puritanical preachiness runs through "Requiem" and after a while it comes to dominate the whole movie.
Basically, this is a film about addiction, addiction to love, addiction to food, to habit, to memory, hope, approval, the future and of course addiction to drugs both legal and illegal. The film doesn't distinguish much between these addictions, instead it layers them atop one another and allows them to reflect off of and inform one another. We watch the central characters struggle with and against their consumptive, redemptive and addictive impulses and we witness the terrible toll these interlinked impulses exact upon their never more than pitiful lives.
All four central characters are drawn in broad, bleak strokes: the gorgeous yet naive art-school girl, her equally naive street-rat boyfriend, the junkie boyfriend's junkie partner in crime and the boyfriend's diet-pill-popping, food and television obsessed mom. Although the performances are uniformly excellent, the characters are thin shells who exist only to demonstrate their internal failings. I admit they're exquisitely rendered shells, with far more detail and nuance than one usually sees in such cautionary tales, but in the end each character is a simple straw man, designed with only his or her own destruction in mind.
That's the problem. The central point ("addiction is bad") is simplistic, and its delivery is staggeringly ham-fisted. Up to a point, I was willing to go along for the ride, led willingly by the truly spectacular eye-candy filling the screen and the exceptionally fine performances that drive the story forward, but after a while I just gave up. I could see the end coming; I could see the Moral Message written in huge, black letters all over it, and I just didn't care any more. Life is not a lesson. Film can be, but don't we as an audience deserve a little more intellectual credit than that?
What could have been an accessible yet experimental observation of the addict's life, presenting both the ups and downs, the good and bad with an eye toward observational truth (with a small t), instead sinks under the weight of it's embarrassingly fatuous and self-important missionary zeal (every single letter in boldface caps). It's like one of those cautionary splatter movies from driver's ed or an after school special about the maladjusted girl who starts slipping a little of mom's vodka into her O.J. at lunch time. Given the money, the talent and the effort expended, such reductive hectoring seems like a terrible waste.
Watch it for the cinematography, the editing, the soundtrack, the very pretty young people with nice hair, and watch it for the performances, especially Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb, but be prepared to be pummeled instructively for what feels like days. (And the "controversial" material in the unrated director's cut is so goddam silly and cheesy you might as well just watch the R-rated version.)