Jagged little pills

Rating: 6/10 (17 September 2006)

I don't know how great of an anti-drug impact director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriter Hubert Selby, Jr. hoped to make (or if that was their attraction to this theme in the first place), but the spiraling downward of four addicts, each from his or her own perspective, is detailed in such brutal terms, climaxing in a fury of sucker-punch editing and unmerciful film-composition, that I found I had to look away. The four main characters (a pair of reckless young lovers, the young man's television and weight-obsessed mother from Brooklyn, and their drug-dealer buddy) hit bottom fairly quickly, and with dire consequences. As a movie-maker, Aronofsky seems to have learned from the best, pulling a Kubrickesque barrage of tricks from his cinematic manual to create both a narcotizing and a nervy effect. The lulling daze these people fall into isn't romanticized--it's seen as a trap--and soon they're just rats in a maze (with Aronofsky filming them through a distorted fish-eye lens). We get insight into the sickness of drug addiction, but little sympathy--and perhaps that's why the film isn't moving on a hearty level (Ellen Burstyn's Brooklyn mom, for instance, already lives in what looks like lower-middle class hell, and the kids have no direction right from the beginning). As a case study, the movie does falter due to the content of style over substance, yet as a visceral experience it's a predictable triumph. **1/2 from ****