REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
**** out of ****
Writer/Director Darren Aronofsky follows up his 1998 success "Pi" with "Requiem For A Dream," a movie with a much bigger budget, but still tiny by Hollywood standards. Pi was made for $60,000; Requiem for $4.5 million, and in both instances, it's hard to imagine getting more for your money than Aronofsky did in those two films.
Requiem stars Ellen Burstyn, who received an Oscar nod for her stunning performance. We meet Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) and her son Harry (Jared Leto) as he comes to "borrow" her TV, and his way of borrowing requires Sara to go down to the local pawn shop to pick it back up. Of course, such acts are born of desperation. He's a drug addict. She travels the same route via diet pills in order to lose weight to fit into a dress she will probably never get to wear. It is this dual road to madness that is the heart of this great film.
Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind) plays Harry's girlfriend, Marion. Her parents have money, but she's estranged somehow. And any parent seeing how she lives her life would shudder to think of the damage she could do with a steady stream of cash, because she's a heroin addict too. Harry's buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) rounds out this dysfunctional quartet.
Harry and Tyrone decide to do what many drug addicts have done, and it follows the simple logic of self-delusion and destruction: deal the stuff, load up on cash, and never worry about your next fix again. Needless to say, it doesn't end well. One doesn't have to worry about glamorizing the kind of drug use in this film; an honest portrayal is the best argument against the behavior it depicts.
While all this is going on Sara ups her own med intake in order to keep the same level of buzz going. Harry tries to warn her when he visits his obviously speeding Mom, but she rationalizes that the medication comes from a doctor, so it must be kosher. She is lost in a fantasy world of infomercials she dreams of being on while her refrigerator comes to life and stalks her out of her apartment, and her mind. It is this delusion of addiction and denial that this requiem is for.
The character arcs here are similar to Pi. The world will have its pound of flesh in the end, whether it's in the form of a limb, your brain's frontal lobe, or the notion of what you will and will not do to get by. Marion limps on a little after this film ends, but her crash can't be far off as she barters with that natural advantage female addicts have over male addicts. The fetal positions at the end are telling in that everyone in such dire straights wants to get back to that home they had before the world got unleashed on them.
-- Craig Franck craig.franck@verizon.net Cortland, NY
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