when dreams and nightmares collide...

Rating: 10/10 (20 February 2005)

My God! "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), what a movie! It's always difficult to write reviews about perfect movies but I'm going to try. First, there are three adjectives which come to my mind to describe this movie and they're the ones which everyone thinks of: powerful, harrowing and heart-breaking and certain sequences remain engraved in the memories like for example, Jared Leto's wounded arm caused by drug.
To watch "Requiem for a Dream" is like being punched in the face. It's the kind of movie which can't leave indifferent. It is impossible to come out of this horrifying movie unharmed. It was made by a young director Darren Aronofsky whose previous movie "Pi" (1998) was very hailed. I must admit that I wasn't fully convinced by this indie movie but here, without a doubt, the director entirely hypnotized me and I thank him for that.
The movie was made from a novel written by Hubert Selby Jr. It isn't the first time that a work from this novelist is adapted for the screen. Indeed, in 1989, Uli Edel had shot "Last Exit to Brooklyn" which developed a nightmarish and apocalyptic vision of a mankind who lived in hell. Here, the movie focuses on 4 main characters. There's Harry Goldfarb. He, his girlfriend Marion Silver and his best mate Tyrone C Love plan to become high-rolling smack dealers. In the meantime, his mother Sarah Goldfarb has got her head in the clouds. She received a call and she learned that she's going to appear on television. At the beginning of the film, the 4 characters' hopes amazingly answers the shiny weather of the summer. But as we usually say: best things have an end. Summer will go away to leave place to fall and winter. Just like the dreams will slowly but surely shatter and the 4 main protagonists will embark on an endless suffering. A vertiginous descent into hell like we have never seen one and which will reach its climax in winter in the last half-hour of the movie. From this moment, the film presents a flood of incredible pictures; they are so painful so much that they make the view unbearable. However, you watch it flabbergasted with both repulsion and fascination.
Darren Aronofsky invites us to a climbing in the morbid. "Requiem for a Dream" strikes by its visual and sonorous frenzy. Through, accelerated frenetic sequences, hysterical split-screens, parallel images, the director doesn't pull his punches to describe this diving in absolute horror for the 4 characters. However, in his crazy making, there's none form of unwarranted nature. The features previously quoted may be disturbing but necessary to answer several things which aren't pleasant to hear like for example, to denounce the omnipresence of the consumer society. These abuses express themselves, here, by the crushing presence of objects, perfectly representative of this society like the television or the refrigerator. The another goals of the film: to make us share the physical and moral sufferings of a drug addict, notably through the deterioration of their visual and sonorous perceptions. But also to show us in a straight-forward and rough way, the dependence of a drug addict on his drug. Aronofsky's message is simple to understand. There's not only the drug like cocaine or amphetamines that make dependent but also simple objects apparently harmless which can become dangerous like the television or the refrigerator. They can destroy our faculties of reasoning and judgment. In a way "Requiem for a Dream" illustrates very well Brad Pitt's key cue in "Fight Club" (1999): "things you own end up owning you...". On the other hand, if we put the stress on drug, the least we can say is that the moments of shooting, the withdrawal times are showed with a realism and bluntness rarely reached. True, "Trainspotting" (1996) had already presented similar scenes but Darren Aronofsky isn't afraid to go further in daring.
It would be unfair to neglect the terrific cast. Beginning with Ellen Burstyn who in all respects gives a dazzling performance. She renders very well the degeneration of her character. In the beginning, she is a normal old lady but in the end, she looks like a senseless living dead. Why didn't she get her Oscar in 2001 instead of Julia Roberts in "Erin Brockovich" (2000)? Then, concerning Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly well their sensitiveness and fragility are impressive. But the biggest surprise is Marlon Wayans. Who could have thought that he could be at ease in a comic role (Scary Movie) as well as in a dramatic role? These 4 actors make particularly harrowing the very last sequences of the film which show them forever in the depths of despair or madness where pain, humiliation and misery suffer into them. And then, during the final credits, we can hear the sea with a little of relief as if we had just made a nightmare.
But what is extraordinary in Aronofsky's work is that he manages to find a little place for humor which acts in an efficient way. In conclusion, this young film-maker has shot a film with a real emotional power. I must confess that I almost shed a tear several times. "Requiem for a Dream" is a movie I highly recommend but beware! It's not a movie for everyone and for the spectators who didn't watch it, I advise you not to see it if you are in a sad mood. It demands a strong stomach and I think the people who say they weren't afraid during the projection are liars. Don't forget your handkerchief.