A trip to the first dimension

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2004)

Can we say it's safe to assume most people have taken drugs one or a few more times? I think we can. Most of us took some and then moved on, a few however couldn't stop and became junkies. Their lives started to revolve around their habit(s); they became criminals, outcasts or otherwise marked by their addiction. Can we say it's safe to assume most of us wonder what they went through? If we can believe the movies it is. More than a few are dedicated to the world of junkies, chippers and drinkers. Welcome to a recent addition: Requiem for a dream.
(Spoilers ahead)
The story is quite simple: Requiem for a dream is about four people who are in a cabride to their doom. The cab being a lot of drugs and their drivers their hunger for it. The end is quite clear from the start; the depressing images and the music (by Clint Mansell, who also did the score for Pi) predict nothing good. This is where the trouble lies with Requiem for a dream; there isn't much else to be told. There isn't much depth to the characters' personalities, because we don't see much of them, a moderate exception being the mother, Sarah Goldfarb (An excellent role by Ellen Burstyn). In my view we enter their lives somewhat too late, and mainly see how drugs destroy their lives. It reminds me of Joel Schumacher's Falling down, where the plot was a daylong journey to inevitable self-destruction of a man (played by Michael Douglas), and the point of the movie was for us to see that happening. Falling down was intriguing to the end, Requiem for a dream doesn't fare as well.
But Requiem for a dream is more a graphic adventure than it is anything else. Some sequences seem taken out of a 'short film', especially the rapid close-ups of substances entering veins, pills flying into mouths and pupils widening when cocaine is blasted on mirrors like exploding bullets. Not all scenes convince and the hip editing can get repetitious, but the scenes where Sarah goes crazy are marvelously disturbing (Actually, she and her whole plotline steal the show). Close-ups with a camera attached to the body (a technique that debuted in Scorsese's Mean streets), visual and auditory distortions, fast-forwards and slow-motions, play with light and color, peculiar camera angles... you name it and it's fired at your senses to keep your attention.
Unfortunately most of the cast can't cut it. Jared Leto may be a handsome kid but he sure suffers from Johnny Deppism too. The same applies to Jennifer Connely. Both show they learned the ability to cry and look really angry in drama school, but where's the fire man, the character? Sarah Goldfarb fares much better as a worn-out loon who has a nervous breakdown and psychosis at the same time. Boy can she go crazy! She succeeds as a metaphor so her character survives being fairly straight-forward. At the end I didn't care much about what happened to the rest.
In the end, Requiem for a Dream has left some traces in my mind from seeing it yesterday so that's a good thing. It succeeds in building tension, nausea, to disturb the senses and the mind, but it isn't the masterpiece it wants to be.
Not in my book anyway.