A Disturbing Masterpiece of Modern filmmaking, no film has done a better job of depicting drug addiction.

Rating: 10/10 (19 June 2002)

A lot of things have been said about this film (from the director of the mind-bending film, PI) but one word in particular comes to mind. Painful. No other film has done a greater service to the issue of drug addiction. Not only are the performances brilliant and emotionally distraught, but the images and sounds are authentic. Edited Jay Rabinowitz has created some of the most disturbing visual montages the world of film has every seen. Matthew Libatique does a fine job a cinematographer, infusing the frantic, distorted shots with Kubrickesque continuous shots which allow the view to breeze through the scenes like an orbiting spaceship. Based on the book by cult novelist Hubert Selby, Jr. (whose novel Last Exit To Brooklyn was also turned into a film) Requiem For A Dream is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite all-time movies.
The story focuses on Harry Goldfard (Jared Leto) and heroin addict who steals his mothers electronics and pimps his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly.) He spends most of his time with his buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans in a surprisingly dramatic performance) looking for ways to score and make it big in the drug game. The scenes in which Tyrone and Harry sell drugs are make money are juxtaposed with Marion's prostitution, to create a strange "good times" sequence. After witnessing a mafia hit, Tyrone and Harry are arrested and most of their money is taken away, so Marion starts seeing Arnold the Shrink (Sean Gulette, who starred in an co-wrote Aronofsky's debut Pi) and sleeping with him for money. The scenes of illness and panic are shot in strange, distorted colors which add to the tone of the film.
Tyrone and Harry continue to search for that big score. At the film continues, we start to learn how they ended up the way they are through flashbacks depicting traumatic childhood experiences. The other big film of the year, Traffic, depicted drug use a casual activity engaged in by senator's daughters and punk private school kids, but Requiem For A Dream digs deeper. The words of Hubert Selby are a perfect basis for a film of this magnitude, and Darren Aronofsky's creepy, symbolic stylings are a perfect match for the gritty pulp fiction of the book. While it is the better perspective on drugs (that most addicts are incurable because they actually do drugs out of depression and as an emotional painkilling self-medicaiton.)
Harry's mother, Sarah (played by Ellen Burstyn in a painfully intense turn) has become addicted to speed pills, which she takes to lose weight after learning that she has the chance of being on a game show. Soon she becomes obsessed with losing weight. The more pills she takes the deeper she sinks into insanity, and the doctors give her more pills. One day Harry comes to visit her to pay her back for the television and learns what she's become. There's a very poignant scene at this point of the film in which Harry sits in the back of a cab crying after learning that his mother is an addict to. While the cliched concepts you'll come across in films usually deal with parents not wanting their children to become addicts, the desperation of Harry is all the more realistic.
The twisted images and concepts that make up Sarah's world are the perfect contrast for Harry and Tyrone's gritty street life. Sarah sits in front of a blank tv screen projecting herself into the game show over and over again like her brain is a VCR on loop. Her social scene consists of the old maids of the building sitting out front in their lawns chairs chatting about each other's childrens and crowding around the mail man every time he comes by. The crowning achievement of the film lies within the creepy speed-induced scenes (in which Aronofsky used fast motion.) The images of Sarah cleaning every square inch in the house and reorganizing all her possesions. Composer CLint Mansell is on a par with Carter Burwell for having made some of the creepiest films scores of the 90s.
With a infected abscess growing on his arm, Harry and Tyrone go on a trip to make more money. When Harry sees a doctor about his arm, he gets himself and Tyrone arrested. The cops find tons of Heroin and they are sentenced to a long term in prison. At this point Sarah has completely flipped her lid and is being given electroshock therapy. It is too late for Harry's arm, and the limb is amputated. At this point Maid Marion has resorted to performing sexual favors and putting on shows for Little John (Keith David) to feed her own addictions. We don't learn much about her, but the character seems to be some sort of collage artist. The most melancholy of the bunch (partly because of what she must resort to for the money) the tension between Marion and Harry coupled with Harry's promises of a better life only add to the denial of their lives. A triumph of American cinema.