Aronofsky's expert depiction of exponential decline into helplessness

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2006)

Pragmatically speaking, there is little more to the plot of Requiem for a Dream than watching four people take six months to approach the inevitability of completely destroying their existences with drugs. Aronofsky's depiction thereof, however, is positively masterful. The hundred minutes are woven together into three signposted segments (summer, fall and winter), each of which is a continuous aptly scored orchestration of addiction and emotion, punctuated only by Aronofsky's rapid-cut drug-use sequences.
Summer sees the four all content, with their respective addictions well-supported, their lives all headed in the correct directions, albeit down ominously crooked paths. The score is light. Aronofsky concludes summer with an emotional and lengthy confrontation between Harry and Sara Goldfarb - clearly the longest cut in the film, and the first in which the characters begin to feel uncomfortable. This uncertainty and tension spills over into fall, when everything begins to turn sour, and the score begins to intensify. The framework supporting the quartet's addictions begins to fray, as Sara begins to increase her drug intake, and the relationship between Harry and Marian begins to falter.
Hitherto, Aronofsky had depicted a fairly stagnant summer, with situations slowly worsening through fall; winter sees the supportive framework around each character collapse, with Sara's physical and mental condition deteriorating, Harry's arm worsening, his relationship with Marian shattered, and Marian's reliance upon prostitution to support her addiction, all with exponentially increasing intensity. The score and cutting subtly follows suit; through the entire winter movement, the music increases in intensity and malice (Marian's score, little more than a light piano melody, grows eerier as the music around it intensifies), and the cuts from scene to scene become faster, and the horrors depicted in them become harder to watch. When the film has finally surpassed its climax, Aronofsky offers no comforting ending: just a portrait of the shattered lives of four helpless individuals.
The purpose of the film is clear: portray the unforgiving result of hard drug use, and; to show how a situation which has been stable for a long time can spiral into oblivion in a fraction of that time. Aronofsky, with a film which lives up to the term 'requiem,' as well as the four lead actors in the film, succeed in depicting exactly these things in a film which demands its viewers are made to feel as uncomfortable as possible for at least ten or fifteen minutes leading to its climax. Very powerful, very moving, and quite excellent.