Drugs, alcohol, painkillers, don’t even watch this if you’ve taken ASPIRIN within the last 24 hours. Requiem For A Dream is extremely moving and powerful and REAL and it could only bring out the worst of any type of mind-altering substance. I watched this film stone sober and in the middle of the night, and when it was over I was almost afraid that the sun wasn’t going to come up in the morning. This is one of the most powerful anti-drug movies to have been released in years.
And the thing that really sets this film apart is that it’s not just a crash course in all reasons you shouldn’t take drugs. There are numerous characters in several different storylines that all converge and deliver a unique message. This is one of the things that made movies like American Beauty so good, there’s just so much going on. The film is a spiraling downfall for all of the characters involved, but it manages to have an unusually strong impact because of its realism, which is ironic because one of the film’s strong points is its striking use of editing. There is a constant use of creative and disorienting editing and cinematography, which gives it a feeling of always being a little off, but it manages to remain realistic enough not to lose any impact.
As far as editing, I was particularly impressed with the creative use of the split screen. The film starts off with a scene in which Harry (Jared Leto) borrows his mother’s television set, and she’s so upset that she locks herself in the other room. In the split screen, we see Harry from two different angles, and on one side, we see broken shots, while the other side shows continuous action. This is done with multiple cameras, so it’s not the sheer difficulty that I noticed as much as the creativeness. And of course, being a drug film, it is full of interesting and sometimes disturbing editing and cinematography.
Jared Leto is excellent as Harry Goldfarb, a junkie who wants to sell enough drugs to support himself, his girlfriend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), his partner in trafficking, and most importantly, his mother. The relationship between Harry and his mother Sarah is the one from which the majority of the emotion in the film is derived, as well as from his girlfriend Marion’s descent into drug-induced prostitution. Ellen Burstyn is stunningly effective as Sarah Goldfarb, Harry’s mother, who lives exactly the existence that you spend your entire youth hoping to never have to live. She is alone, she’s overweight and unattractive, and she’s so obsessed with getting onto a stupid TV show just one time that she goes on such an intense crash diet that she literally drives herself insane.
And then there’s the antagonistic refrigerator, which is one of the more interesting things about the film, and should also be noted for its originality. What was the last respectable film you saw in which an inanimate object like a refrigerator was made to have such a successfully menacing presence? Jennifer Connelly has changed dramatically from the cute actress that we saw in her older films like Labyrinth and Career Opportunities and The Rocketeer. In Requiem For A Dream, she delivers a spectacular performance, proving her skill as an actor. But it is the performance from Marlon Wayans that is by far the most surprising and noteworthy.
He plays the part of Tyrone with such amazing skill that it’s almost impossible to believe that this is the same guy that we saw in the god-awful Scary Movies. Here’s hoping he’ll gravitate away from the cognitive vacuums and get more involved with movies that can be enjoyed by people with more than one brain cell operating simultaneously.
(spoilers) The movie is also smart enough to give us, on numerous occasions, believable examples of How People Get Like That. A perfectly plausible story is provided in which a nice but rather pathetic woman becomes obsessed with her chance to appear on television and winds up getting electro-shock therapy against her will in a mental hospital, and then we see that Marion winds up engaging in lesbian shows for crowds of drunken jerk-offs, and Harry shoots up so much in the same arm that he has to have it amputated. These are the kinds of things that make you wonder how they got like that, and in this movie we see how it happened, and it’s actually believable.
Requiem for a Dream is not one of the most cheery movies I’ve ever seen, in fact, it is downright disturbing at many points, but it is powerful and effective and should be noted for that. The film is photographed and edited in creative and interesting ways, which not only makes it fascinating to watch but also enhances the drug element of the film, which was also a technique used with huge success in the must more well known film Traffic. There is a lot of difficult to watch material in this movie, but it is a very well thought out film. Not for the weak of heart, but this is an excellent piece of cinematography.
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