Old fashioned morality play reworked for the hip-hop generation.

Rating: 7/10 (25 March 2009)

Four loosely connected people get caught up in the world of prescribed and illegal drugs.
Pretend this is a school project. Write a first draft of a screen play about the subject and where it all leads. Just kidding, just pretend you have. Then go to this movie and tick the boxes: Yes it is fun, fast and making life better in the early days, but in the end it is just downward spiral towards despair, degradation and serious illness.
Given the story is just one giant cliché (in capital letters), the question is how well and how originally the cliché is played out. I have to say pretty well. If you enjoy hip-hop and fast cutting. Some real low budget style from Darren Aronosky. Keeps it moving along at a steady clip.
Yes, the budget is pretty low and the actors a little bit too good looking (Jared Leno is the only junkie I have seen with a six pack), but this is for the MTV generation. Bad/good messages have to a bit of boom-boom-boom in the background or the audience will fall asleep.
Oscar people love over-the-top (look at the rewards for Deniro and Nicolson) and Ellen Burstyn makes it to the red carpet by going completely and utterly bonkers. So bonkers that you ask, how could she have got on a subway train? Found a building? And what happens to her after makes no sense either. They don't force feed people/shock people like that in hospitals - that went out decades ago! The script is as mad and over-the-top as her fantasy world.
I don't take drugs. Not from a moral or legal point of view, only that I have never viewed self poisoning as a way of making my life better. If coke was on offer at the local petrol station I wouldn't touch it. Some people do, that is their knee-jerk. I am not better than these people, only different. Who connects with this story (and some must look at the IMDb rating!), it must be people who think, "drugs have a place and can help." As I said before, maybe they can for a while.
The popularity of the film is a clear indication that people need - still - reminding about what they are really doing and where it can lead. Requiem is a small failure in that it doesn't seek to highlight lives that were going anywhere or leading to anything anyway. If you prostitute yourself you are obviously capable of prostituting yourself. Despite being movie cliché and law - some people don't prostitute themselves even when starving. However they never get their lives portrayed on film. And sex is always exploitation in film - even when it is pretending not to be...