Darren Aronofsky (2000)
To be fair to Darren Aronofsky, hard as that is, now’s the wrong time to watch Requiem for a Dream for the first time – but it turned up in BFI’s ‘Discomfort Movies’ season so I decided to see it. Why is this the wrong time to make the film’s acquaintance? Because it’s so hard to view Aronofsky’s second feature in isolation from his subsequent work. In the nearly twenty-five years since he made it, attention-grabbing, overwrought, mostly hollow drama has become his stock-in-trade (The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), Mother! (2017), The Whale (2022)). Whatever novelty the pyrotechnics of Requiem for a Dream may once have had, has been dissipated by repetition.
Based on a 1978 novel of the same name by Hubert Selby Jr (who shares the screenplay credit with Aronofksy), Requiem for a Dream tells the story of four New York lives destroyed – badly damaged, at any rate: no one quite dies – by drug addiction. The setting is Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in the present day. The foursome comprises lonely widow Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn); her beloved only son, Harry (Jared Leto); his girlfriend, Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly); and Harry’s friend, Tyrone C Love (Marlon Wayans). Both of the latter are Harry’s partners in narcotics crime. At the start, Sara is a different kind of addict, described by her son as a ‘TV junkie’. Her life takes on new meaning when she receives a phone call telling her she’s been selected as a contestant on her favourite television game show. Sara sets her heart on wearing for the occasion the bright-red dress that she wore for her son’s graduation, before Harry went wrong. The dress is an uncomfortably tight fit so she embarks on a crash diet. When that doesn’t work Sara, on the recommendation of her friend, Rae (Marcia Jean Kurtz), goes to a doctor. He prescribes amphetamines, with predictable results. The weight falls off Sara; soon addicted to her prescription drugs, she spirals out of control.
Requiem for a Dream is a hundred and two minutes of visual and sonic overkill. There’s handheld camerawork and a fisheye lens. There are split screen sequences. Some bits are in slow motion, others speeded up. Aronofksy repeatedly punctuates the narrative with a montage: a needle is filled, a bank note rolled, and a TV switched on, before blood vessels expand and pupils dilate. On the soundtrack, distorted and/or discordant noises underline the garish imagery. Aronofsky gives us the works and encourages his cast to do the same. Three of the four main characters are Jewish; except for Jennifer Connelly, who has a Jewish mother, the actors playing them are not. This adds vocal and gestural effort to what are already hyped-up performances from Jared Leto and, especially, Ellen Burstyn.
Yet Sara supplies the main human interest in the story – partly because Burstyn does so much acting (and it takes talent and nerve to do what she does), partly because Sara has more individual context than the other principals. Each of them has their ‘dream’ but the youngsters’ dreams are dramatically tame. As well as using heroin, Harry deals it: he and Marion want the funds to open a business, selling clothes that Marion has designed. Tyrone keeps having flashbacks to when he was a boy (Te’ron A O’Neal), living happily with his mother (Denise Dowse): as an adult, he means to make her proud. Perhaps because he’s an African American, Tyrone is by far the sketchiest character, explained chiefly through his clichéd flashbacks. Sara’s addiction is a cliché, too, but her TV thraldom gets so much OTT coverage, including fantasy sequences, that the film starts to give the impression that the box, rather than drug abuse, is the root of all evil. There were times I felt I was watching a sequel to Network (barely a fortnight after undergoing the original).
If its style weren’t so visually hyperbolic from the word go, Requiem for a Dream might have more impact when the going gets tougher, for Sara in particular. As it is, her eventual hallucinations and ECT treatment amount to no more than upping the ante. Nearly everything is grotesquely exaggerated. Sara and her neighbours – other middle-aged to elderly women, implicitly as solitary as she is indoors – sit in a row outside their apartment building in deck chairs, taking the sun. Aronofsky often gets DP Matthew Libatique (interesting to note they were working together so early in their respective careers) to shoot the women’s faces and ageing flesh in extreme close-up, to make them as ugly as possible. It’s worth adding that, once Sara goes off the rails, her neighbours disappear from the film, surprisingly incurious about what’s happened to one of their number. Until, that is, Rae and Ada (Louise Lasser) visit Sara in hospital, to find her in a catatonic state.
Harry, meanwhile, has headed with Tyrone for Florida, where a shipment of drugs is meant to be arriving. Harry persuades Marion to work as a prostitute while he’s away, and she does. The Florida expedition doesn’t end well. Harry has part of an arm, become gangrenous through heroin use, amputated. Tyrone goes to jail, there to be abused by racist prison guards. The closing shot of each of the four main characters shows her or him lying in a foetal position: Darren Aronofsky shows off to the bitter end. Whatever social concerns he may have had in making Requiem for a Dream are submerged in his grim grandstanding.
19 July 2024
