Beautifully horrible

Rating: 8/10 (28 February 2011)

Requiem for a Dream is a mesmerizing and ultimately startling look at the horrors of addiction. Its visual electricity and propulsive dramatic decent make you feel like you're on a roller coaster that's going up and down at the same time.
This film covers three seasons in the lives of four people. Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is an old Jewish widow living in a Brighton Beach apartment. The story begins in summer, as Sara's junkie son Harry (Jared Leto) takes her old TV for the umpteenth time to pawn it for drug money. Sara has become terribly afraid of her son, but Harry is too wrapped up in himself to recognize his mother's fear or his own awful behavior. Harry uses the money from pawning the TV to get high with his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), while Sara sits in her apartment watching the same weight loss infomercial over and over and over.
Then two things happen to send the already unfortunate lives of these four people down a dark and vicious path. Sara gets a call that she's been selected to be on a game show and Harry and Tyrone decide to become drug dealers in addition to junkies. Sara becomes obsessed with showing up on TV looking exactly like she did in Harry's high school graduation photo, so she dyes her hair and goes to a quack doctor for "diet pills" that will let her fit into the red dress she was wearing in the photo. Meanwhile, Harry and Tyrone start selling heroin on the street and are so wildly successful that Harry makes enough money for Marion and him to start a clothing store.
But as summer turns to fall turns to winter, things go from bad to worse to horrific. Sara becomes addicted to the "diet pills", gulping down more and more and being battered by mood swings and disturbing hallucinations. Tyrone gets caught up in the middle of a drug killing, forcing Harry to use most of their money to bail him out. That puts them in a hole they're never able to crawl their way out of. As madness chews up Sara's mind, Harry, Tyrone and Marion are forced to consider and then do more and more awful things to get the drugs and money they're convinced will fix their lives. When the end finally comes, Sara and Harry fly completely apart while Tyrone and Marion keep grinding away through their torturous livesand it's not clear which are worse off.
Requiem of a Dream is based on a book of the same name. The author, Hubert Selby Jr., helped co-writer/director Darren Aronofsky create this film. But most movies adapted from books face the same challenge. Motion pictures are, by their very nature, all about motion and things happening. That makes them very sensitive to plot. A lot of very good books, however, don't have very good plots and emphasize other aspects of storytelling. When you take the story from the book and try to make it a film, those poor plots usually become much more prominent and the story suffers for it.
Aronofsky faces that threatening obstacle here. The plot of Requiem for a Dream is no more complicated or involved than this - "A woman, her son and his friends get caught up in drugs and progressively more and more terrible crap happens to them". That's not a lot to sustain a 102 minute long movie. Aronofsky confronts that problem head on by using a dizzying array of visual techniques to substitute mental and emotional movement for physical action. He uses split screens, extreme close ups, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, montages, special effects and blends and divides the images of this film in just about every way you can imagine. Instead of it being about what the characters are doing, it becomes about the imagery is showing us how the characters are experiencing their own increasingly sad and sordid lives.
Requiem of a Dream is about how addiction, and not only to drugs, takes a hold of those who turn to it as a respite from their own unhappiness. Not only does the respite turn out to be brief, but the addiction ends up magnifying and intensifying everything that made you unhappy in the first place.
Aronofsky's superb direction is complimented by some very good acting from the cast, particularly from Ellen Burstyn. She got an Academy Award nomination for this role and it's as deserved a nomination as any actress has ever received. Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans are no slouches, either. There's a deep vein of desperation running through each of their characters and they show you how each character's nature deals with that desperation in different ways.
Now, watching 4 human beings destroy themselves in rather gruesome detail is not everyone's cup of tea. This movie is definitely NOT casual entertainment. If you're looking for something that explores human darkness without wallowing in it, while dazzling you with virtuoso filmmaking, Requiem for a Dream is a must-see.