Requiem For A Dream

Young Coney Islanders Harry (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are three mixed-up heroin users with dreams of the easy life. Harry's mother (Ellen Burstyn) meanwhile dreams of going on a TV game show. All discover that their dreams are really nightmares in disguise.

Films about hard drug-users are often challenged for their tendency, in part the very nature of cinema, to aestheticize, glamorize or simply make entertaining, self-destructive behaviour. No-one could lay such a charge against Darren Aronofsky's film. As a rendition of the horrors of drug addiction, it is unquestionably one of the best. Any vestige of vicarious enjoyment or identification is well and truly vanquished by the embittered hand of cruel fate. Fate, in this instance being directed by author and co-screenwriter (with Aronofsky), Hubert Selby Jr who has a particularly bleak view of the human zoo. (He also wrote the gruelling Last Exit To Brooklyn, which was filmed in 1989 by Uli Edel)

Without in any way decrying its " failure" to entertain, it is that unrelenting bleakness however which is perhaps will draw criticism. Whilst much that Requiem shows is very probably true if the various elements are taken separately, combined they tend to suggest, as the film's title announces, an authorial/auteurist preoccupation with maintaining a particular attitude rather than a concern to reveal the actuality of human behaviour. And that, in a film of this nature, which is making a strong statement about human weakness is somewhat of a problem. Perhaps in this respect it is misleadingly narrow in scope. One film that came to mind whilst watching this was Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). It similarly takes on broken personal dreams yet amongst the sadness there was humour and ultimately something good

Having said that, this is a remarkable film, conceptually ambitious and full of technical flair, albeit not to everyone's taste. Even if in the latter respect it is also somewhat reiterative it is the most effective instance of using visual FX to suggest drug-altered states that I can think of. 

Leto and Connelly, looking like they stepped out of a rock video clip, are well-cast in the roles of the young lovers but Ellen Burstyn is outstanding as Harry's widowed mother whose life spirals out of control as the boundary between fantasy and reality collapses for her. The Kronos Quartet provide some effective string backing, somewhat reminiscent of Mike Leigh's masterpiece of urban alienation Naked (1993) and as a rendition of the horrors of heroin and amphetamine addiction, if that's your thing, Requiem For A Dream is marvellously effective.

 

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