Minimalist technique a poor match for subject matter

Rating: 6/10 (12 May 2015)

Spoilers== "Requiem for a Dream" is a minimalist look at the degradation caused by drug addiction, in this case heroin and amphetamines. The technique and subject, however, match poorly. This causes the film to fail to genuinely affect the viewer.
Technically the director is very clever. For example, for most of the film, the heroin shooting is shown only as a collection of objects, all shown in the same order: powder, spoon, flame, needle, dilated pupil. Or a popped pill.
In keeping with the minimalist approach, the three young main characters are one-dimensional. The older character, who is the mother of one of the two young men in the film, is fleshed out more, but still doesn't rise to a level where we can identify her as a distinct person. (Ellen Burstyn was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for this role in the film.) Like a piece of minimalist music, the film beats on the same instrument throughout, with slight changes in intensity as the only variant. The soundtrack was provided, appropriately, by the Kronos Quartet, which adds to the relentless, droning atmosphere of the film.
But we are dealing here with drug addiction, an enormously complicated and personal thing that doesn't submit to the minimalist technique. No internal or external causes are provided for why the young characters picked up the needle in the first place. Fate isn't that interesting.
The three young characters begin the film as happy heroin shooters, but when their supply is cut off, they become very unhappy heroin shooters. That's essentially the plot for them. The mother character is also broken at the beginning. She is a widow whose son is always off pawning her TV to score drugs. Her only solace comes from watching the recording of an inane TV infomercial that promises salvation through weight loss. She becomes obsessed with recovering her youth. On the advice of a friend, she visits The Most Negligent Doctor in Brighton Beach (the American Brighton), who prescribes buckets of diet pills.
The film then shows the decline of all four characters into their various forms of degradation. Mom ends up committed to a mental institution. We are shown three of her electro-shock therapy treatments. The son and his partner in scoring heroin end up getting caught in a Southern state on a trip to Florida to score. The son is seen shooting heroin into a necrotic vein; the arm eventually has to be amputated above the elbow. His partner we see writhing in withdrawal symptoms on a prison bed, there being no treatment for him in the unenlightened correctional facility where he is held. The son's former girlfriend becomes a sex worker at private parties to support her habit.
Which is all very gruesome of course, and earned the film notoriety for its harrowing last 20 minutes. Still, it seems mechanical and pointlessly cruel. The ends each of these characters finds is of course realistic; the fact that all of them meet such horrific ends is less so. So the artificiality of the movie eventually works against it. The lack of any knowledge of the characters' motivations is unsatisfying. There is only horror instead of compassion.
There were no dreams, and a requiem is an entirely different kind of music.
A much better film in the genre of heroin-will-ruin-you-seriously, is "Trainspotting". Better music, real people, and even humor.