Well, THAT was a waste of a good title.

Rating: 2/10 (5 August 2001)

You need a strong stomach for this film, just as you need a strong stomach to drink seawater. In both cases, what's the point? Watching Aronofsky's film isn't so much like drinking seawater as being rubbed all over with sandpaper - a treatment painful beyond belief, yet superficial. No doubt Aronofsky STARTED with the intention of saying something about the Oprah Winfrey "follow your dream" mentality, but that idea was lost or buried in the early planning stages; all that he successfully demonstrates is how bad heroin and those colourful little weight loss tablets are. For most people it's not worth finding out. We already knew THAT they were bad. If a few souls are dissuaded from taking these substances I suppose that will justify the film, more than compensating for my suffering and for the fact that it's a rotten work of art.
In "Pi" (which wasn't a rotten work of art) Aronofsky showed that he didn't know how to use black and white; here he shows he doesn't know how to use colour, either. I didn't know it was possible to get that sewage-filtered look on film - I thought you needed digital tape. And if Aronofsky wants miserable overcast lighting, that's fine, I really have no quarrel, but he should wait for the sun to stop shining before trying to get it. It's that modern auteur's disease, the desire to achieve all visual effects by manipulating the camera, without trying first to manipulate what's in front of the camera. Hence also that jarring split screen effect. At one point Aronofsky even splits the screen to get both his actors in the same frame, when they're lying together in the same bed. A director with any sense would have tried asking them to lie closer together.
The terrible thing is that Aronofsky is talented. The difference between his technique and, say, Oliver Stone's, is the difference between thought and bombast; you know where Aronofsky's going with his visual gimmicks, even if there's usually a better way he could have got there. This is more true in "Requiem" than in "Pi". Aronofsky is getting better at making worse movies. It's frightening to think how bad his next one will be, if he improves any more.