REQUIEM
FOR A DREAMREQUIEM
FOR A DREAM
You know from the start that a junkie movie has to end gloomily, and all requiems are pretty dour. But no movie in recent memory is as aggressively depressing as Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky's film version of the Hubert Selby novel. Like fast cuts and fast living? Then you'll enjoy the first half of the movie, when Aronofsky's film-student-on-speed editing matches the still-euphoric groove of his characters' nascent addictions. But as the spiralling toilet-flush of fate sours the pursuit of dreams and sucks everyone to their respective dooms the movie's formal flashiness and deep cruelty become increasingly alienating. The good-looking Brooklyn hipsters Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) and Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly) are engaging and almost believable, although neither actor really overcomes the clumsy dialogue with which they have to work. And MarlonWayans is the cast's only unabashed hit as Tyrone, Harry's partner in drug-dealing. But the key to both the movie's distinctiveness and its ultimate disappointment is Ellyn Burstyn's character Sara Goldfarb, Harry's widowed mother. The script's intriguing emphasis on Sara's lonely fixations on self-help TV, junk-food, and ultimately, diet-pills, as addictions every bit as paralyzing and pathetic as the young uns' dances with heroin, initially seems to promise a Magnolia-influenced broad canvas of suffering and survival. As Sara's pill-induced hallucinations and psychic dissociation grow (along with the intercut deterioration of everyone else), however, Aronofsky shifts into outright torture of his characters, and loses his audience.