Requiem for the glorified junkie

Like Darren Aronofsky's 1998 P, Requiem for a Dream traces its characters' paths from obsession to addiction to disintegration. This time the problem is drugs, not theoretical math. The film follows four addicts from blissed out, frenetic happiness through their eventual disintegration. The movie becomes an orgy of destruction—a visual bacchanal of virtuoso editing, thumping music, and image after image from four lives beyond redemption. The brain-stabbing scene in P looks like Bambi by comparison. When coupled with Aronofsky's rapid cuts, split screens, and hallucinatory images, Requiem for a Dream's brutally frank depiction of its characters messes with your mind like nothing else.

COURTESY ARTISAN When the checks from the WB aren't enough for Marlon Wayans.

The film opens with protagonist Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) returning to his mother's apartment in order to steal her TV once again so that he can pawn it and get some extra cash for drugs. Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) locks herself in her bedroom as Harry wheels the TV out the door to his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The two then proceed to wheel it across Brooklyn, find some coke, blow some coke, and spend the rest of the day jumping around Harry's apartment. As the movie progresses, we're introduced to Harry's girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), a rich Manhattan girl who's bounced from psychoanalysis to slumming it with Harry.

Harry and Ty hook up the deal of lifetime and plan to become players in the New York heroin scene. Marion starts planning to design clothes and open a boutique. Sara gets a call from a company that searches for people to put on TV and finds a doctor who'll put her on a regimen of uppers by day, downers by night. She (predictably) starts losing weight and can again fit into her all-important red dress. Her building's collection of fellow Jewish widows loves her.

Then comes Aronofsky's intertitle "Fall," as failure after failure leads up to the film's wrenching climax. Essentially an extended montage, it feels like a Clockwork Orange-style conditioning exercise designed to eliminate any desire among the audience for needle drugs or amphetamines. Suffice to say that it includes, in rough order of appearance: running sores, prison, back-to-back lesbian anal sex watched by a crowd of screaming businessmen, electroshock therapy, and amputation, all accompanied by an electronic score that sounds damn near sadistic in context.

The emotional beating that Requiem for a Dream inflicts begs the question "Why?"—and the answer is simple. This is the drug movie that puts every other recent drug movie in perspective. Trainspotting was a great film, but it made heroin look like cliff diving. Smack was something really exciting and dangerous that people crazier than you and me do for fun, until they get sick of the side effects and clean up. In Pulp Fiction, coke, heroin, and ODing were just parts of some crazy retro schlock-noir lifestyle. Tarantino didn't show a needle breaking skin, just the backrush of blood swirling into a syringe. Requiem for a Dream presents addiction, pure and simple. Its characters are shattered, humiliated, and dehumanized.

Film

Requiem for a Dream Directed by Darren Aronofsky Starring Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans, Jennifer Connelly, and Ellen Burstyn York Square Cinema

The film succeeds, however, because it doesn't fall into the standard drugs are bad, while life without drugs is sane and wonderful, polarization. Sara's life before pills is slow-moving misery dominated by crappy TV and sitting on the sidewalk with a bunch of other gameshow-watching widows. It's a movie about fucked-up people doing fucked-up things, which in this case is hard drugs. All four leads put in excellent performances, especially Wayans, who proves that, Scary Movie notwithstanding, he's a talent to be reckoned with. And Aronofsky's direction, criticized by some for being overwrought, draws the viewer into his characters' dementia.

Darren Aronofsky has produced a masterpiece. Requiem for a Dream is a disturbing, even demoralizing descent into the world of drug abuse. You'll walk out of the theater wondering how you were able to sit through it, but you can't deny his, or his cast's, immense talent. Let's hope Aronofsky keeps on producing more aggressive, innovative movies like this one.

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