Brash and up-front depiction of an array of people and their connecting with varying forms of drugs; an ambitious piece which works really well.

Rating: 7/10 (26 August 2011)

One of the more terrifying things about Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is how numerous extras appear to just 'exist' amidst proceedings and merely get on with their own lives, fleetingly mentioning the odd happening from recent times, as they intermingle with the film's core characters whom are witnessing their own existences fall apart at their very seams. Watching these people going about their business on screen reminds us of the same way those figures, or people, in our nightmares mingle around in the background as we dream on; we're aware of them, much like the central characters are aware of them here, but we cannot really make them out nor indeed really work out what it is they're saying or plotting. Often, we feel at the mercy of them; we pray that they're not speaking or plotting against us. Such are the situations the numerous leads, in this rather eye-opening urban drama that does carry an hallucinogenic, nightmarish quality, eventually come to bury themselves in; a sad, sorrowful film depicting the gradual falling away from reality of a number of people because of drugs or drug addiction in varying forms as well as falsified dream chasing.
What is most admirable about the film is the manner in which how, the now somewhat renowned American director, Darren Aronofsky manages to take an idea one might surmise with a one-sentence pitch and manages to spin a tale out of it all that's cinematic and with a distinct, applied aesthetic which engages without ever glorifying and never at once feels like a lecture. The film revolves around a handful of disparate New York-based characters, their tales running parallel in a multi stranded fashion with their coming into contact with drugs, or the drug trade in some form, making up the meat of film's core. It is, much like 1996's Trainspotting, a smart and cunning drama applying a post-modern spin to what might constitute as what the British used to refer to as 'kitchen sink drama' in its depiction of predominantly young, attractive people destroying their lives through the lust for a drug fix. In this sense, Aronofsky has made a 'whizz-bang' film guaranteed to keep those of a younger disposition in their adult lives occupied whilst tell a tale systematically demonising the activity within, and yet retaining enough intensity for it to appeal to those well beyond the dangers of slipping into drug addiction.
Jared Leto plays Harry Goldfarb, a young Brooklyn based man with a penchant for class-A drugs, which his girlfriend Marion (Connelly) additionally shares, and constantly on the look for ways into the narcotics trade operating out of this shady corner of The Big Apple. Living not so far away from Harry is his elderly mother, Sara (Burstyn); a woman living in a decrepit apartment with a flurry of other elderly women, of whom spend most of their time sitting outside in the summer's heat on the pavement, and whose lone item in her flat that's worth any money at all is her television. The things in life to which she holds dear lie in the form of one of her son's school photos, depicting the kid at better and more affluent times, and that television through which she gradually observes herself becoming the newfound star of a kind of reality TV show following a phone call from the network inviting her in.
The film dances between the two strands with the sort of consummate ease that would have you think it were were a piece composed by a filmmaker seemingly nearing the height of his game; Marlon Wayans' local lowlife Tyrone Love filtering into proceedings on account of being good friends with Harry and later heading his own story of grief when things reach a hilt. Aronofsky seeps a sense of repugnance through proceedings; a 'sickness in the stomach' feeling; an aesthetic feeding off what can only really be likened to that of the drug-induced, nauseating aesthetic certain American films from the turn of the 1970s, in the form of Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy, carried with them. There is a gross repetition to some events that unfold which, rather than frustrate the audience, has feel the clammy, grotesque sensation rife throughout. Sara's gradual obsession with weight loss pills and the necessity to essentially look as thin, and therefore ill-mindedly beautiful, as possible dominates her story; the film, as it depicts her seemingly withering away to a desired size, rears the other way in its depiction of her surroundings by gradually bulking out her apartment into this medieval chamber of filth and mould – a locale in which she looses her mind; hallucinates inanimate objects coming alive and suffers premature proleptic shifts to stardom plus the conclusion of this celebrificated process she desires.
Harry is a good looking boy with a good looking girlfriend; both of whom admit they love one another very much and we sense in an alternate world, they'd be able to settle down away form all this. Their brief, gentle early embrace is a hundred-times more erotic than the depths toward which young Marion will have to later plunge for her drug 'fix'. Then there is Tyrone's path formulating out of the events, a strand more akin to being a gangster film or drugs trade thriller which might have made a fascinating short all by itself. The film, in spite of being driven by a very simple message or core thesis, is constructed around the incorrect use of lens' deliberately done so to induce sickness; excruciatingly low camera angles and cinematography encompassing good uses of extreme close ups of objects that aren't nasty to look at, but evoke reactions of disgust anyway. The film is a hardened and substantial peek into the crevasses of drug addiction merging uneasily with mental illness; a peek that is studiously executed in what is a highly effective drama.