Probably too effective

Rating: 4/10 (15 June 2005)

This movie is probably the most effective anti-drug statement ever put on film. What watching it proved to me, less than that being a junkie isn't any fun, is that I don't have as strong a stomach as I thought. I've made it through some pretty rough movies, but even those were basically just entertainment. Requiem is a different matter, and is the first movie where I couldn't make it all the way through; after enduring the first hundred minutes,I fast-forwarded through the last twenty. The movie depicts the lives of four people living on Coney Island whose lives go awry due to drugs. Harry Goldfarb, his girlfriend Marion, and his friend Tyrone are already drug users, but as the movie begins seem to have their use pretty well under control. Marion dreams of opening up her own clothing store, while Harry and Tyrone are trying to set themselves up as drug dealers. The fourth character is Harry's mother, a widow who spends most of her time in a dreary apartment eating candy and watching a bad self-help show. So the movie isn't exactly a laugh-fest to begin with. But hold on, it's gets even grimmer from here. Stylistically, the movie is quite impressive. I had previously seen his debut film, Pi, which shares a similar, deliberately grungy look, as well as aggressive editing. I wasn't a huge fan of that film, which at least in my memory seems rather lacking in substance to match its style, but I do remember being impressed by its rapid montage, repeated multiple times, of the obsessed protagonist swallowing pills. For Requiem, Aronofsky elaborates on those sequences with montages of the addicts' drug taking, showing only small details, such as the needle being readied. Working with a bigger budget here, he's able to pull out all of the stops, including split-screen, speed-up motion, and micro-photography, in order to convey the highs and lows of a junkie's existence. But this movie isn't just a director's show; the actors are also very impressive, though largely because of their sheer willingness to pretty thoroughly abase themselves for their roles. This is particularly true of Ellen Burstyn as Sarah Goldfarb, who never flinches from her painful role. Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans manage to make their junkie characters sympathetic enough to care about what happens to them. I never expected that there would be a movie sex scene involving Jennifer Connelly that I wouldn't want to see, but it's here, which may or may not be a somewhat dubious distinction (it was in fact at this point that I decided to skip all the way to the end). Despite its generally harrowing quality, there are points where Aronofsky's willingness to go to extremes starts to dip over into absurdity. A scene where Leto and Wayans encounter a cop and Leto imagines stealing the cop's gun plays more like a stand-alone commercial than a scene in a movie. Another fantasy sequence, this one belonging to Sarah as her mental breakdown begins, literally breaks down the wall between reality and the movie by having her imagine that the talk-show crew invades her apartment. The effect isn't disturbing so much as jarring, by reminding us that we're watching a movie- something that the rest of Requiem, for all of its overt stylishness, avoids to stunning effect. But while the acting and the technical aspects of this film were very good, why I thought it fails is because of the intent behind it. The movie amounts to little more than the world's most extended anti-drug commercial. At some level, I think that all movies should be entertaining; not necessarily fun, but involving and satisfying to the audience. Maybe it's that I'm just too conventional to accept Aronofsky's brutally honest vision, but I think that there's a problem with a film that wants to put the audience through as much discomfort as possible. Instead of telling a story or conveying a mood through the camera, Aronofsky seems to want to use it as a weapon for mounting a sensory assault on the viewer.