This is the third in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009. Addiction is a monster with an insatiable appetite, which is appropriate that Requiem For a Dream is more a horror film than anything else. This is not Trainspotting or Blow; there is no irony or humor in the destruction that drugs cause. Requiem bypasses all the winking drug culture acknowledgment and taps into the repulsion and the terror of addiction. It does it on the ground level with four people who have otherwise good souls with real hopes and dreams, real aspirations that float on the edge of the screen. And then addiction guts them from the inside out.
Requiem For a Dream is a horrifying film. Its dread can be almost unbearable. The first time I saw it the audience seemed relieved that it was over, as if its depictions were some form of emotional torture. Truly, though, it can be intense: the drilling music, the character’s pathetic conclusions, the unrelenting editing. It pounces on you and doesn’t let go. The effect is haunting and disturbing, yet provocative and strangely cathartic. It’s also deeply, deeply heartbreaking.
The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel of the same name, a novel that perversely exempts itself from basic grammar and punctuation. At the time of the film’s production, Aronofsky was a rogue independent filmmaker. He had done Pi on the fly without permits in New York City. After Requiem, in 2000, he would go on to do his long-delayed, nearly abstract science fiction film The Fountain and then his exploration of a deeply wounded has-been in The Wrestler, where his credibility to the masses was cemented in his careful direction of has-been Mickey Rourke. But Requiem For a Dream was his watershed moment in cinema. It defined his commitment to his material, specifically his characters, who he wasn’t afraid to bleed out within his plots.
Requiem’s four stars cover the gamut of addiction. First there’s Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The three of them, wander around Coney Island and Brighton Beach with no purpose. In time-lapsed montages we see them doing drugs: the fidgety boredom of marijuana, the wired energy of cocaine, and then heroine, their drug of choice, which makes them quiet and reflective as they stare at the ceiling and dream. They use the drugs to inspire them: Marion imagines owning a fashion boutique with her designs on the racks, and Tyrone and Harry want to buy some pure heroin so they can “off it” and settle into an early retirement. The fourth character is Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother, who has to buy back her television set on a weekly basis after Harry sells it near the boardwalk for drug money. “When you gonna put an end to this and tell the police on Harry, Mrs. Goldfarb?” the profiteering recipient of the TV asks. She couldn’t turn in her only son, she says and then hauls her set back up to her apartment. Sara’s drug is her past, which she dwells on but can never gain back. Later, after a telemarketing hack convinces her she’s going to be on television, Sara starts taking diet pills so she can fit into a beloved red dress that signifies the happiness that was once so distinct in her now-indistinct life. Eventually, after only several days, the diet pills stop working and Sara begins popping them handfuls at a time. At this point in Requiem For a Dream, everyone is hooked on something and the downward spiral turns into a nosedive down into the void.
What happens next can only be described as a brutal, all-out assault on the senses, relentless and unflinching. Sara grows more paranoid as her uppers stopping sending her up, and her downers stop sending her down. Her sanity drifts in and out, and eventually she’s wandering the streets a drooling mess. Harry, now completely dependent on heroin, starts itching at an infection at his injection site on his arm. The wound screams at him for more drugs, yet each needle plunge assures his demise. Marion, unable to cop her fix on the street with money she doesn’t have, sells her body to Big Tim (Keith David), an upscale drug dealer who trades his product for sex or demeaning sexual performances. Tyrone gets off the luckiest with just jail time on a minor drug charge, although cleaning up in jail is no treat. The finale is meant to shock and offend — Sara getting electric shock therapy, Marion engaging a huge dildo at a sex party — because the effects of addiction are shocking and, yes, offensive. I’ve given away some of the third act’s secrets, but the film can’t be described in text — it must be experienced. People talk about great editing in movies, like the famous baptism sequence in The Godfather, and those discussions should always include the entire last third of Requiem For a Dream, a virtuosic collection of sequences. By the time the third act begins, the film turns into a bleak, offensive opera of degradation: The jarring music, by electronic artist Clint Mansell and strings by the Kronos Quartet, becomes the wave the film rides on. The editing cuts relentlessly between our four characters. And the pace feels like an expression of panic or hyperventilation. Watch, too, how the three acts use color: summer uses warm golden hues, fall begins to incorporate more cold blues, and winter abandons all hope inside claustrophobic fluorescents.
The colors aren’t the only camera trick, either. Requiem utilizes a bunch of in-camera tricks, some of which were invented here and are now overused gimmicks in the industry. Aronofsky and his cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man) use time-lapse photography to show Sara cleaning her house, hanging and spinning cameras to show the falling dreams of Marion and Harry, and the famous “body-cam,” which is a camera attached to an actor’s body giving the impression of a purely subjective point of view. In one scene, the camera is attached to a vibrating motor that oscillates depending on the volume of the performance. In another scene, Sara’s grapefruit breakfast is eaten in still-life elegance with no hands in the frame. To illustrate the drug use, which is never shown in any broad detail, Aronofsky filmed dozens of close-ups: lighter sparks, heroin spoons, cotton swabs, needle pokes, veins loosening and pupils dilating. These quick shots — all added up to only a second or two of film — are strung together with appropriate sound effects to show the repetition and compulsiveness of drug use. Doing it this way, without drug paraphernalia laying in every shot, it allows us to watch the behavior of the characters and not the mechanics of the drugs.
Using all these tricks, Aronofsky has made addiction into a modern-day horror story, and he’s done it with the decade’s most underrated performances. Burstyn, in a fat suit for the first half of the picture, was nominated for an Oscar for her role (and famously lost to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), but the film didn’t get a single other Oscar nomination. No Leto, no Wayans and no Jennifer Connelly, who deserved a nomination and a win more than she did for her winning performance the next year in the completely forgettable A Beautiful Mind. These brave actors become these characters on such deep levels that their demise is painful, their hurt hurts us. By the time they curl up on their beds in those famous last images, the film has wounded us on a spiritual level — “What a waste,” we tell ourselves. This is a frantic, ferocious movie and it cuts like a razor across the face of all that we hold dear, our dreams and our aspirations. Addiction is the very real monster that lurks out there waiting for us, and Requiem For a Dream is the monster’s exposé.
