| Overall Grade: |
A+ |
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| Story: |
A+ |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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| Visuals: |
A |
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Supremely depressing, sublime
by Sunshine (movies profile)
May 27, 2008
60
of
64 people found this review helpful
One cannot always go to the movies to be delighted and entertained. Occasionally, the artistic power of a movie overwhelms the fact that the audience leaves it more depressed than they entered; some lessons are painful to swallow. But Darren Aronofsky's second serious directorial foray (after 1998's Pi) is sublime: perfectly crafted, a triumph of the cinematic medium.
Based on the book by Hubert Selby Jr, the screenplay was adapted by the author himself, giving the movie an occasionally narrative feel. But there can be no complaint about his film version, which is if anything more compelling than his original book, sparser and starker, drawing all of the attention of the poignant central strings which provided the grist of the novel.
The film is dominated by the equipoise of four dazzling acting job: Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), her son Harry (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The other actors are all thoroughly marginal, with the exception of an excellent performance by Sean Gullette as a shrink so palpably slimy that the audience cheers when he's stabbed in the hand with a fork. But the central four characters are so compelling that everything else in the movie is forced into the background.
The movie is a parable of the insidiously destructive influence of drugs, at its fundaments. Each of the four characters begins the film in a state of purgatory--not too good, not too bad: Sara is an aging mother who languishes in the solitude of her housing project, her only joy in life watching her infomercials; Harry, Marion, and Tyrone are underachieving twenty-somethings without much in life besides their regular dalliances with the harder end of the pharaceutical spectrum: cocaine, heroin, an occasional blunt. The disconnect between the generations seems unbridgable, and the film at its start follows two very separate sets of lives, brought together only by Harry's recidivistic pawning of his mother's TV to pay for his fix.
But this schism is only the foreplay to the film's deft bridging of that gap. Tyrone hatches a plan to save up a little capital and buy their drugs in bulk, and resell them at a profit--to become big-time drug dealers, that pie in the sky for the disenfranchised entrepreneurial youth. Harry and Marion enjoy a brief period of ebullition as the plan works, and money flows in. Marion dreams of opening a clothing shop and designing her own lines, and the two begin shopping for storefronts. Meanwhile, Sara gets a telemarketing call from her favorite informercial telling her that she's been selected to appear on the show (she hasn't). Trying to slim down for her television appearance, she goes to the doctor for diet pills--a potent cocktail of amphetamines to kill the appetite and sedatives to permit sleep at the end of the day.
The turning point in the movie comes as Harry visits his mother, a reversal of his earlier burglaries of the television. Flush with cash, he has bought her a huge new set. Seeing her teeth chattering and fingers twitching, the drug maven groks that his mom is "on uppers," and objects violently. The hypocrisy is telling: he doesn't want his mother on the same drugs he's willing to use and sell so freely. Sara explains that she's scheduled to appear on television, and wants to look her best; Harry knows it's all a pipe dream that she's been sold on. But she's unwilling to let go, even in the face of her son's beratement. "It gives me a reason to wake up in the morning," she finally says, a shrunken and pitiful woman already, sold on a dream that even her son sees is impossible. That her fervent dream is to appear on her vapid informercial only makes her plight the more miserable.
But the movie is a requiem for their dreams, and quickly their respective fortunes turn sour. Their business dries up along with their heroin connection, leaving them in the grip of profound withdrawal and clawing for a new hookup. Sara devlops tolerance to her drugs and begins taking ever-higher doses when her doctor proves unhearing of her worries and just hands her more prescription sheets. Ultimately, all four will end up in the most abject throes of misery. Even the most expressive columnist could not exaggerate the horror of their fates, and out of these falls emanates the movie's emotional core.
At every turn, the four heroes of the story--and heroes they are--are simply trying their best to realize their dreams. These are good people, despite their drug use! The road to hell, though, is paved with good intentions, and it is into hell that all descend, though gradually. All four actors proffer intricate and revealing performances: Burstyn as a woman possessed of both unremitted dignity and devastating naivete; Leto as simultaneously worldly and innocent; Connely as an idealist with a tumerous disregard for the means to achieve her ends; Wayans as a jaded man trying to regain the kind of innocence Leto so poignantly evinces. These are true tragic heroes after the Greek model, deeply decent humans with an ultimately fatal flaw. But in this flaw comes the unifying leitmotif of the movie: all turn to drugs as the means to their successes, and all are ultimately betrayed by them--or rather, by themselves.
The final scene, set to the pounding music characteristic of the movie, is precisely the catharsis after which Euripides or Sophocles strove. Clint Mansell's orchestration follows only two main themes: one embelmatic of the moments in which their dreams struggle to be born, the other which grows ever more dominant as those hopes are lost. Paul Oakenfeld, uncredited co-writer of that latter theme, deserves adulation for its simple and yet evocative beat, bringing out the horror of that final sweep through the fates of the four that burns the music into the mind of the audience.
Creative cinematography through the film--with rapid segues, sharp justaposition of colors and grays, and stunningly original short montages accompanying every instance of drug use--has driven the moral of the story home throughout, a constant tattoo of admonition. The finale is only the quintessential crescendo of the parable's rhythm.
The audience will surely leave the theater more sober than they entered, having gaped appalled at the devastation of the pitiable heroes. But that sobriety is no sin when the screenplay behind it flows so perfectly. Requiem for a Dream may be the most depressing film most moviegoers will ever see, but therein lies its profound power and achievement. |
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