Will make your head swim and for all the wrong reasons

Rating: 3/10 (7 July 2007)

The worst kind of American art-house movie; it takes itself seriously and is so full of 'smart' cutting and transcendent photography it will make your head swim. It's about drug addicts and all the attendant horrors of addiction and Aronofsky films it like a very bad trip. Half way through the movie you feel like beating yourself over the head with a hammer, or better yet, beating Aronofsky over the head and from here it's all downhill.
The central characters are a boy and his mother. He's your typical screen addict, a young crack-head on a downward spiral. He's played by the handsome but inadequate and monosyllabic Jared Leto. Ellen Burstyn is his mother, lonely and with dreams of appearing as a contestant in a television show who becomes addicted to diet pills and prescription drugs and it's a monstrously over-indulgent piece of acting. The character never strikes you as being real, (very little in the movie does), so to show just how far gone her character is Burstyn keeps giving us The Mad Scene over and over again.
There are two other addicts in the film, the boy's girlfriend and his associate, and in these parts Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans are really very good. Their parts aren't particularly well-written but these two talented performers find a truth in their roles that rises above the formulaic junk. Indeed, this is probably the best acting that Connelly has yet done. But the movie's a downer and not for the reasons Aronofsky would have us believe.