This is a powerful and great simple story, but the material is too spare to be great.

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2006)

Harry Goldfarb is a not a bad guy, he has many redeeming qualities just the wrong dream. He cares about his mother, has a nice good looking girlfriend that likes him, and at least one friend. And we see those redeeming qualities in scenes that are too short, and maybe a little too pat. OK, this is the scene where he shows us that he is caring son, this is the scene where...that's how the scenes ultimately come off; striped to the bone of most nuances of humanity and as a vehicle to move the story along. I don't like Leto's work much, but it is still difficult to blame his performance and not the script's abridgment in this movie. One could almost sense Aronovky struggling with the limits of the budget, but that's still not an excuse for the underwritten quality of the scenes in this film. When you're making something this powerful, you go to the United States Department of Health and Human Services or NIDA for the extra cash to shoot three or four more scenes.
Consider the following scene. Marion and Harry go to have a wild time, off drugs, if we can imagine that, on the Atlantic city boardwalk. It is important for us to see them bonding while not on drugs, since only then when they do commit that unpardonable sin to the self, we can fully empathize with each of them. They ride the Farris wheel, then go grab a hot dog, and after that end up on the roof like they did in the film. A sequence, and not individual scenes no lees.
Aronovsky would have done well spending some time in humanizing the characters further before unleashing their devastating fall. Before you tear it down you have to build it up. If one hasn't built all of the relationships and the characters up before tearing them down, then there really isn't much to tear down. Our emotions are continually obligated to grind and shift from gear to gear following the choices and actions of the characters, instead of cruising easily in automatic.
Furthermore, Requiem, with its balls out creativity, relies too much on those same special effects for emotional substance which should have been created with more action and perhaps dialog. That kind of creativity can only underline what is already there, not create it by its presence. It seems to me the kind of special effect shots Aronovsky uses play best when they are part of a cohesive symphony rather than an elongated short story. This is a powerful and great simple story, but the material is too spare to be great.
This is a great film for Aronovsky. Standing on the shoulders of the visuals of his mostly unmatchable student film Pie, Requiem explodes with raw energy and socially attempts and succeeds to some degree to undue as someone has written, :"...everything that Tarantino has done to make drugs glamorous." It is a great little story, and a very good film. All it needed to be great are the few things that I talk about. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing, but judging from his work on Pie, and now this film, cutting his story aesthetic toward minimalism when it doesn't exactly serve the content might be ingrained in this director. If I am right, time will tell if and how his films will mature.