Reefer Madness for the MTV generation...

Rating: 1/10 (22 July 2004)

This is a film. This a film addicted to gimmicks. SPLAT! Any questions?
The pretentiously titled REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is a film that is dark, depressing, achingly dreary and laughably awful at every turn. It is like watching a drunk or an addict wallowing in self pity, only to have him interrupt his moaning and groaning with fits of uncontrollable laughter. You don't know whether to pity him, laugh at him or just smile and slowly back away. Nowhere else will you find a film so self-consciously solemn and meticulously constructed, yet so hysterically out of control.
The film is about the evils of addiction, so it is ironic that the director is hopelessly addicted to clichés and gimmicks. One thing for certain is that director Darren Aronofsky seems desperate to impress somebody. He's the kid with the thesaurus who can't turn in a book report unless he makes certain that every word is at least 10 letters long. Only now he's a film school kid who just figured out how to use all those cool gadgets on the camera. As such, REQUIEM is wall-to-wall cinematic tricks: split screens, split-second editing, fisheye images, fast forward, time lapse and oh-so many really nifty-crazy-weird camera angles. It all goes for that Oh-wow! factor. But when every scene is a calculated stunt, then no individual stunt has any effect. It's like an opera screeched in only one note or a room where everything is the same shade of blood red. The overall effect is shockingly effective only because it is all so unrelentingly unpleasant.
The idea, I suppose, is to clue us in on how hyper the world must seem in a drug induced haze, but that is rendered meaningless since the film goes hyper even during innocuous moments. Indeed, what passes for everyday reality is presented as being so melodramatically arty or intensely overwrought that at times Aronofsky has to resort to the overtly ridiculous to even get back our attention. By the time Ellen Burstyn, as a diet pill-addicted old lady, finds herself being terrorized by her refrigerator, the film takes on the air of a particularly grotesque skit from Monty Python.
Even worse than Aronofsky's taste for psychedelic overkill (apparently inspired in equal parts by bad MTV videos, trendy TV commercials and grade-C drug movies of the 60s), is the director's self-righteous arrogance in assuming he has something original to say. Drugs are bad! Gosh, who knew? But even the simple nobility of that sentiment is buried under the sludge of his technique. The fates of the four main characters is so extreme, and so extremely presented, that the film unintentionally trivializes the very lecture it so pompously presents. Their fates -- insanity, mutilation, prison and sexual degradation -- are presented, not with an air of remorse and pity, but as a manic cinematic freak show. This is REEFER MADNESS on LSD; scare tactic propaganda served up as if it were from a crazed evangelist.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the poor actors are forced to overact just to keep up with the hectic pace of the film's stylistics. Lost between their obviously phony Nu Yook accents and bug-eyed emoting, there is little room for genuine characterizations. Indeed, the fact that any semblance of a performances even survives is remarkable considering Aronofsky's veg-a-matic editing style. There are poignant moments, however fleeting, when the actors reveal depth and complexity in their characters, but those instances of subtlety are brushed aside as Aronofsky rushes to get back to the grandiose surrealism.
Can there be anything more personal than an addiction? Yet, Aronofsky has made a film that is frenetic, yet cold and mechanical. This is a film by a filmmaker who has no faith in either his message or his audience. Everything is hammered home, amplified and repeated because the director doesn't think we will get it if he simply states the obvious. Had Aronofsky just made a simple little horror movie, maybe his gross-out/creep-out/freak-out stylistics might have been amusing. But he has tackled a serious social issue and reduced drug abuse to the level of being a Freddie Krueger bogeyman. I don't doubt the sincerity of his anti-drug rant, I just find it hopelessly condescending. It is film-making as shock treatment, designed to beat the viewer down to the point of vulnerability, exhausted and ready for brainwashing.