Movie Review Throwback: Requiem for a Dream

American heavyweight filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s surrealist, provocative and disquieting cinematic style has garnered him a highly subversive status throughout the length of his career for the agonizingly violent, austerely sombre and penetratingly frank portrayals of his subject matter imbued at the core of human life. A deep entanglement of lost happiness, distant love, tortured pain and a yearning for fame permeates Aronofsky’s second directorial feature, itself based on transgressive American writer Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 namesake novel – the helmer offers a sobering and heart-rending depiction of four heroin-addicts that leaves profoundly lasting traces on the viewer.

Initially released to positive critical acclaim and huge box office success, Aronofsky’s multi-perspective psychological drama, Requiem for a Dream (2000), chronicles the emotionally-charged and highly tormented experiences of numerous Coney Island-residents as they plunge into a spiral of pain, insanity and loss. The drug-bound lives of these lost characters who find themselves increasingly steeped in psychological isolation and despairing madness are introduced through a young Jared Leto’s penetratingly sensitive and harrowing performance. Harry, a desperate and troubled junkie embroiled in a toxic relationship with his similarly drug-addled, brown-tressed girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), careens around New York with his equally drug-fixated friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), with whom he aspires to succeed as a big-time drug dealer.

Rated R in the US for its highly visceral depiction of drug use and sexuality, the film is frequently pigeonholed in the same category as similar drug-centred films released during the same period – Trainspotting, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – yet Aronofsky himself stands wary of the classification, highlighting the unique twist his film possess in introducing Harry’s mother as an unlikely addict. Ellen Burstyn delivers an astonishingly unsettling Oscar-nominated performance as Sara Goldfarb, a psychologically-deteriorating, home-bound widow glued to her TV screen with aspirations of escaping her quotidian life. Aronofsky declares, “The Harry-Tyrone- Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with Sara’s story, we suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, what is a drug?’ […] I thought it was an idea that we hadn't seen on film and I wanted to bring it up on the screen.”

Indeed, Aronofsky’s depiction of the dark underbelly of the American Dream through his characters’ downfalls starkly captures the audience’s unease, blurring the line between the archetypal drug addict and the wholesome next door neighbor, the wayward, rebellious son and the covertly neurotic, equally impressionable mother. Aronofsky doesn’t just depict the pitfalls of drug addiction; he highlights the inherent neurosis that exists in every individual, rendering them susceptible to the seemingly impossible. Certainly, the helmer accentuates the fast-paced sense of doom that incessantly haunts the foursome, with his frequent montages of short, clipped shots. Aronofsky uses over 2,000 cuts in addition to the pervasive use of split-screens and close-ups to convey the deep sense of isolation and all-engrossing passions that engulf the characters’ increasingly separated lives.

The film has garnered an astonishing string of awards since its release nearly two decades ago, with its effects reverberating in the world of cinema long after its initial release, receiving a nomination at the 2009 Austin Film Critics Award for Best Movie of the Decade. Aronofsky’s portrayal of these ultimately empty, hollow shells of their former selves, completely eschewed of their conceptions of reality, scarcely even appears to be direct cautionary tale – the rapid descent of this cross-section of society into a deep lunacy and tormenting lifelessness, speaks volumes in itself.