No requiem for formulaic anti-drug films: they're alive, well & wearing a new skin

Rating: 1/10 (9 July 2003)

The reason people keep searching for meaning in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is that there isn't any deeper meaning to be found, aside from a message available in much earlier cinematic work, say, REEFER MADNESS. Whereas that is amusing and once effective propaganda, this is just hot air -- typical Aronofsky -- plenty of flashy style, zero substance. You can understand why he tackled the "drug issue": sensationalism and melodrama get attention for an aspiring auteur.
Or perhaps anti-drug films have gone undercover. What else could they have done to spread a message that is now laughed at (THE ROAD TO RUIN, REEFER MADNESS)? Perhaps their answer to the modern, cynical, jaded youth is a new style of propaganda evident in films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. As propaganda, this might work, despite the over-the-top melodrama. it's the surrealism, ironically, that sells it so well, as if to say, "We know our anti-drug evidence sounds preposterous. The reality IS surreal!" As art, however, it fails unequivocally, and REQUIEM is intended as entertainment, not education. Perhaps, though, this subconscious purpose to the film is what has inspired viewers to find meaning in REQUIEM. But let's stick to calling a film a film, and judge it on that basis.
At best, REQUIEM is an ignorant, inexperienced, preposterous, propagandized claim of the so-called evils of drug use. That is "at best" because propaganda can be so masterful it is worthy of artistic mention (e.g. Riefenstahl). REQUIEM, however, is so melodramatic, pointless, unbelievable, and desperate to attract adherents to its false mastery of invisible metaphor and allegory that it fails to even be successful as propaganda, something any after-school special or episode of GROWING PAINS can accomplish.
Nothing is new here in the treatment of the subject matter; nor, even, the style. TRAINSPOTTING brought stylistic surrealism into vogue for (anti-)drug films, and did so much more effectively and without losing all sense of reality and veering into the realm of melodramatic tripe like this. Beyond that, almost all "drug films" express the exact same message. I think it's been drilled into your head enough to forgo spelling it out. All REQUIEM does is scream out that message melodramatically, and then add a bit of surrealism to make like art cinema.
It wouldn't be so surprising if the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (office of the U.S. "Drug Czar") actually had a hand in this project, considering the fact that this film was produced in the heyday of ONDCP bribery of Hollywood (exposed by the online magazine Salon in 2000 -- just search for ONDCP TELEVISION SCRIPTS in your favorite internet search engine. America's favorite TV shows were edited and modified to contain anti-drug propaganda, courtesy of bribes amounting to tens of millions of dollars a year for the networks. If it was, I might be more forgiving to the filmmakers for producing such an annoying attempt at faux art.
Marcel Duchamp's prank exhibit and amusing statement (a urinal) for a 1917 art show didn't make it in, but, apparently, if he had written inside the urinal "the consequence of drug use" he would have won critical acclaim -- at least by the standards that this film has achieved high regard. The only potentially brilliant aspect of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is that the filmmakers may have realized that fact, and shrewdly succeeded with this project in terms of self-promotion. For art, however, I would rather stare at that urinal.