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a home + living guide for the post-college, pre-parenthood, quasi-adult generation

06.07.2001

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flick pick | Requiem for a Dream 2000
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Hubert Selby Jr. [novel + screenplay], Darren Aronofsky [screenplay]
Starring: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayons
Language: English
Look for it at the video store under:
drama
Watch it when you’re in the mood for something:
artsy-fartsy, disturbing, serious
The verdict: ½/ 5 the rating system explained

Plot synopsis Sara Goldfarb is a lonely, aging, overweight widow who spends her days glued in front of the television set, watching videotapes of her favorite motivational speaker, Tappy Tibbons. Her twentysomething son Harry is her pride and joy – that is, when he’s not pawning off her television set, time and time again, to support his drug addiction. Harry spends his days shooting up and hanging out with his beautiful, junkie girlfriend Marion, until he and his enterprising best friend Tyrone decide to get in on the drug-dealing business. The two buddies start up a nice little venture dealing off the Coney Island boardwalk, and for awhile, things look good as the money begins to roll in. At around the same time, Sara receives a phone call informing her that she’s been selected to appear on a television show. Excited at the prospect and determined to fit into her beloved red dress on the big day, Sara promptly seeks out a doctor who’ll prescribe her some diet pills. As the pounds fly off, Sara discovers that speed is an even better form of escape than her former addiction, TV. Soon she’s so addicted to the high that she’s popping uppers and downers uncontrollably. Meanwhile, Harry and Tyrone lose their supplier and are fast running out of enough money to support both their heroin habits, plus Marion’s as well.

Review Requiem for a Dream left me feeling completely, utterly, drained. The four main characters are all so hopelessly lost that you feel a little like you’re getting sucked down into hell right along with them. All of which is to say that the film is extraordinarily successful at accomplishing what it sets out to do: depict the harrowing experience of drug addiction in excruciatingly realistic detail. The acting is so good it’s almost hard to watch, as each character begins to disintegrate from a normal-on-the-outside, messed-up-on-the-inside human being into a walking corpse. Both Ellen Burstyn and Jared Leto, as Harry and Sara respectively, are 100% believable in their roles, but the real revelation is Marlon Wayons, who proves that, all prior work to the contrary, he can actually act. Stylistically, the film is astounding, employing a dizzying array of dazzling editing and camera tricks, from nifty disorienting split screens to hyperkinetic time-lapse, to the rhythmic barrage of exquisitely-shot close-ups that Aronofsky frequently employs as a transition between scenes. It’s all so surreally beautiful to watch that despite the ugliness of all that misery and desperation, you can’t help but keep your eyes glued to the screen. Requiem for a Dream isn’t an enjoyable movie to watch. But as the film itself seems to suggest, we, as a culture, are all a little too dependent on escapism anyway – whether its through drugs, food, TV or movies. Sometimes you need a good harsh dose of the uglier sides of reality, and Requiem for a Dream gives you just that, brilliantly. —reviewed by Y. Sun 

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