Requiem for a Dream
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NC-17, 102 m, 2000
Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Stars Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, et al. 

A couple of summers ago in San Francisco, during one exceedingly overcast and clammy afternoon, I decided to cut short my usual stroll through the filth and squalor of Haight Street by ducking into the neighborhood Cineplex. I was hoping to shake off my swelling glumness with a diverting piece of moviemaking, but the roster behind the ticket counter indicated that screenings for the most prominently advertised pictures were either already engaged or sold out. But then I noticed that seating for a little film called Requiem for a Dream was still in progress and a few tickets were still available. This promised to be a much needed break in the day’s gloom because I had heard encouraging things about Requiem from fellow cinephiles, and the marketing poster for the flick in the theatre’s lobby touted a myriad of enthusiastic blurbs from the nation’s leading critics. After slapping my eight bucks on the counter, I felt my previously dejected mood dissolving as I grabbed a bundle of concessions, and then raced for the screen at the end of the hall. The auditorium was buzzing with anticipation. With Milk Duds in hand, I crept down the middle aisle, attentive with every step of not losing one of my unlaced loafers to the gummy theatre floor. The house lights were already dimming, so I hurriedly slumped into the nearest available seat. As the curtains parted, the rear projector sputtered to life, illuminating the ragged screen in front of me. Following the requisite trailers, the soundtrack to Aronofsky’s Requiem began to crack and boom throughout the house. The film was set amidst the mucky, abandoned beaches of Coney Island, and the episodic narrative intertwined the lives of a handful of junkies, their compulsions whirling madly out of control until they were stripped of all self-worth and left decomposing in the gutter. It was a painfully overwrought cautionary tale, and it strung together remorselessly grim vignettes of drug ingestion with a loutish battering of hip-hop montage that tormented my senses with the fury of a heavyweight prizefighter. Director Aronofsky pulled out all the stops—fish-eyed lenses, sound distortion, accelerated rear projection—but his gallingly obvious film school trickery couldn’t conceal the fact that the movie’s central thesis about substance abuse wasn’t much deeper than that of an “After School Special.” As the closing credits rolled, my temples were still throbbing, leaving me feeling twice as shoddy and discombobulated as I did before I entered the movie house. I couldn’t make sense of the audience’s obvious enthusiasm for the picture, and the lavish praise heaped upon it by the country’s reviewers only confounded my puzzlement. Time hasn’t assuaged my annoyance with the film; it’s only intensified as I see more and more young movie directors emulating Aronofsky’s ostentatious manner. Requiem for a Dream is an incessantly cheerless assembly of harebrained clichés. It’s also a puerile, self-conscious stunt, one that has regrettably appointed director Aronofsky as the ringleader of a new wave of painfully affected filmmakers that champion style over substance. 

In 1998, Aronofsky achieved notoriety with his minimally budgeted debut Pi, a dog-eared black and white thriller about obsession. The cult following that developed around the film led to Aronofsky’s association in 2000 with Requiem for a Dream, a similarly granular and psychologically restless subject based on the novel by Hubert Selby, Jr. With Requiem, Aronofsky toiled assiduously to approximate Selby’s subjective style of prose, but by dispensing with the genre’s conventional dogma, he wound up cutting together something that can only be described as the exact opposite of cinema verite. Requiem stars Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb, a reclusive, overweight widow addicted to television, particularly the infomercials of a self-help guru with the riotously cheesy name of Tabby Tibbons. Sara’s infatuation with the idiot box is periodically disturbed, though, when her shiftless, smack-crazed son, Harry (Jared Leto), pawns it for dope money. Harry and his buddy, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), spend most of their waking moments wacky on the junk, but they soon hit upon an idea to start dealing dope so they can eventually escape the squalor of Coney Island and hightail it to the summery orange groves of Florida. They can’t quite get their plan into motion, though, because they are too preoccupied with getting high. In fact, Harry is so routinely out of it that he can’t get worked up over the fact that his arm is disgustingly infected from constant needle abuse. The potentially amusing ends at which these two idiots will go to score a fix echoes the arduous heroin quest of Tim Roth and Tupac Shakur in Gridlock’d, but Aronofsky can’t seem to find the humor in all this. I felt no sorrow in witnessing the boys’ ultimate ruin, either, because the director’s wearisomely dour outlook promised that they were damned from the get-go. 

As Requiem slithers forward, things get even more ugly. The suffocating tedium of Sara Goldfarb’s life is briefly alleviated when she wins a chance to be a contestant on Tibbons’ TV show. Resolute to make a distinguished impression, she sets out to lose enough weight so she can wear here favorite red dress on air. Alas, her willpower is weak, so she acquires a prescription for diet pills from a shifty-eyed doctor. Sadly, her initially controlled regimen eventually spirals out of control and into drug-induced dementia. She hallucinates her refrigerator coming alive, its ponderous chops attempting to swallow her whole, and the paper-thin walls of her miserable apartment giving way to the blinding lights and fervent crowd of a Tibbons broadcast. She envisions herself as a medusa-haired floozy, spewing vulgar jokes and smacking gum while participating in a conga line with Tibbons and his company of fawning sycophants. These hallucinatory spells don’t seem a reflection of the character’s crazed mind-set, but rather another illustration of a rowdy director showing off. Though Burstyn gives a truly harrowing performance at times, she soon degenerates into an object of ridicule, a figure o’ fun, and you find yourself not knowing whether to feel pity or out-and-out contempt for her. Worse, this whole funfest culminates into an orgasm of inelegant and inflammatory images as the director cuts between a crazed Sara receiving electro-shock, doctors amputating Harry’s infected arm, an incarcerated Tyrone puking his guts out, and Harry’s girlfriend being anally violated in front of a demented assembly at the high-rise of a local affluent character. Have I mentioned that this isn’t a family film? 

Many have applauded Aronofsky’s idiosyncratic visual manner, but I’m loath to trumpet him as any sort of iconoclast. Aronofsky is a master of synthesis, though, and his films mingle the ideas of far superior moviemakers in a fashion that recalls the works of once equally imitative talents on the order of P.T. Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. Pi owed a significant debt to David Lynch’s Eraserhead and the Orson Welles masterpiece The Trial, but Requiem varies a bit because it scrounges a good lump of its trimmings from Brian DePalma (the split-screens of Dressed to Kill and Carrie), Martin Scorsese (the celebrated Arriflex body-brace tracking shot of Harvey Keitel’s drunken merrymaking in Mean Streets), and to a lesser degree, Oliver Stone (the harried splicing of varying film stocks and archival footage in Natural Born Killers). As obvious as Aronofsky’s borrowings are, it’s surprising that the more cinematically astute haven’t dismissed him as just another pretentious film school hack. He has rather become a darling of the film community, prompting other budding auteurs to cultivate his revisionist approach. 

Aronofsky’s films are simply pitched too high, and he’ll utilize the same assembly of jarring cuts and disconcerting thuds to hammer in a point that most intelligent viewers will probably pick up long before he relents. Doesn’t the director realize that for all his razzmatazz, the most effective moments in Requiem are the quieter ones? I was thankful when he finally retired his bag of tricks and found a relatively sedate way to shoot the more tender moments between Burstyn and her son. Aronofsky is a poseur, a huckster, and the cheap way in which he clowns on Sara Goldfarb indicates to me that he shares more than a few of Tabby’s slimy qualities. He’s captured the imagination of film aficionados, though, and more than a few hot-shot directors are now following his lead by mining material from superior sources to frame their pictures. Naturally, I can’t abide this trend because cinema needs new voices—not directors who are content just to ape the masters.

August 9, 2002

© Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.