Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Well that was rough. I had to watch it in parts, at first because I couldn't get into it, and later because it was intense, and often off-putting. It was effective though I think, Darren Aronofsky is a director that you can't just watch placidly, you have to grapple with everything he does, he makes it that way. The plots, the themes, and the execution, he has an idiosyncratic style. I haven't seen Black Swan yet, and now I both want to more and am afraid to more. I was very impressed with The Wrestler, but didn't like The Fountain.

Requiem is only Aronofsky's second film, it is a story about addiction, an examination of it through four interleted characters. In a way its like an updated more intense and graphic version of The Days of Wine and Roses, a relationship that may have seemed promising but was doomed.  Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto do good work as the doomed couple, and Marlon Wayans is satisfactory as the best friend, but its Ellen Burston's movie.

I love Ellen Burston, she just enhances everything she's in, your drawn to her performances. She's strong even when portraying a weak character like this one, Sarah Goldfarb. Her husbands dead, her son's a trial, she lives in a small apartment on Brighton Beach, and I suspect living off some kind of welfare. She enjoys watching an infomerical over and over again. She gets a call from a casting service saying she has been selected to be on TV, presumably for a game show.  She's not told when, or for what program, only that they will be contacting her. She waits, she waits, she gets a form, she fills it out and then she waits again. She's not happy about how she looks, she wants to lose weight for her television appearance, but every diet she tries she finds she can not sustain, a neighbour tells her about these wonderful little pills.
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The repeated sequences of the drug ritual, Sarah's pill popping, the toking up or whatever it is the other characters are doing. Things spin around and around, going faster and faster. One of my main problems with the film at first, in addition to not having the most relatable characters for me, was how slow it seemed. But the pace picks up and keeps going and going, building and building. By the end were ricocheting between character and character as they repeat parallel mistakes and actions, as the spiral leads to inevitable and unpleasant conclusion, until all is lost.

So needless to say a bit of a downer. But quite something, which even though I didn't really 'like' this movie, I was impressed. Your forced to go to a place you'd rather not, to witness a train wreak, and I don't know if you could ever make a better anti-drug movie. It's something.

Great