A Dreamy Trip Through the Hell of Addiction

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2000)

One of my favorite moments in cinema occurred when Cocteau's hero in Blood of the Poet desperately tries to rub off a pair of lips from the palm of one of his hands. Having rubbed the lips from the a portrait he has painted, the artist is told by the living statue in his studio that a scar like that is not that easy to remove. From there, the hero is thrust into a Kafkaesque dreamscape where he realizes that `sleeping or dreaming, the dreamer must accept his dreams.' There is such a sensibility in the new Aronofsky film, as characters seem to float between a harsh realities and dreamscapes.
If Darren Aronofsky is remembered for anything in the annals of filmmaking it will be for staging the definitive `drug movie.' It is a masterwork of cinema that manages to stage the act of drug use as a cacophonous act of self-destruction where the individual will scale the ends of a their seemingly shallow existence in order to further dissociate themselves from their self-imposed, pathetic lives.
Aronofsky goes for the jugular as he bombards the viewer with a dirty, lyrical pathos that is instantly reminiscent of the seemingly masochistic fashion that Paul Thomas Anderson greets his characters in the climax of both Magnolia and Boogie Nights. Take the final image of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark and stretch that for nearly two hours and you have the gut-wrenching and harrowing effect of this film.
Manipulation is a word that is too easily thrown around when talking about films like this. Those who have suffered or have seen others suffer from the effects of addiction will no doubt find a very confrontational truth to this film. Aronofsky, whether personally familiar with the chaos of drug use, knows the desperation of the addict who seeks out the next fix like a vulture scavenging on a rotting corpse.
Eugene O'Neill's maternal figure in `Long Days Journey Into Night' was a sad, pill-popping woman who was hopelessly stuck in the past. Her only link to her drug-free past was a wedding dress lying quietly in her closet. Ellen Burstyn is that woman. Slowly wilting away in her Brooklyn apartment, her husband in his grave and her son catering to his growing heroine addiction, Sara Goldfarb finds herself compelled by the simple pleasures provided by a TV game show that promises self-actualization to its viewers in the form of fortune-cookie wisdom. One phone call later and the promise of being on the TV show has Sara shockingly falling into a vortex of self-imposed hatred as she desperately tries to fit into the red dress she wore to her son's high school graduation.
This is no dream that is being lived, but a self-imposed reality, and Aronofsky stages the descent into hell as an act of mourning. Clint Mansell, who orchestrated a phenomenal music for Aronofsky's Pi, creates some of the more dramatically effective crescendos imaginable; beautifully complimenting the journey these characters take into nothingness.
The final images of the film, focusing on the winter of the characters' lives, is admittedly extreme, but only in the sense that it spares the viewer nothing in showing them the degrading lengths people will go to, and the degrading end results that welcome them, at the hands of addiction. And when teachers instruct their students as to how to master the fine art of drama, let it be known that Ellen Burstyn will be remembered for having given one of the finest and most revelatory performances to have ever graced an image of celluloid.