Requiem for your self-respect

Rating: 1/10 (24 October 2002)

Remember the anti-drug commercial where a girl points to an egg, says, "this is your brain," and then screams, "this is your brain on drugs!" as she smashes the egg with a skillet and proceeds to demolish the entire kitchen, screaming, "and this is what drugs do to your family, this is what they do to your future..." and so on?
If you can imagine that commercial going on for two hours, done with great visual style and editing, with acting that ranges from excellent (Ellen Burstyn) to terrible, you can skip this movie. While Requiem for a Dream sells itself as an important movie about important subject matter, it does nothing to explain why REAL PEOPLE do drugs. Its characters are not people. They suffer without reflection on their own states, while the filmmaker attempts to bombard you with visual symbols explaining what they want and feel. While one could interpret the device used to explain why the Burstyn character continues her downward spiral, the game show, as a meaningful symbol for individuals' desires for acceptance and recognition, I don't think it is one. It is a gimmick that condescends to the character by making her desire for acceptance pathetic and silly. The movie tells you what to think about her inner motivations by staging them in a highly subjective way.
This way of revealing character is consistent throughout the movie. Characters are without interior lives, or at least their interior lives are not revealed. At the same time, the movie uses symbols (the game show, the television, etc...) to suggest the reasons for their desires. While real people do drugs for complex reasons which are hard to unravel, these characters are living in a movie-world symbolism which suggests familiar, "important" reasons for their behavior that tie into the most materialistic, shallow aspects of our society. And of course the shallow, cheap aspects of our culture are harmful to us all, and we recognize them in the movie. So despite their lack of depth, is not hard for us to relate to these characters, and maybe even feel sorry for them, since they exist only as empty vessels into which we may pour our own self-pity.