Review: Requiem For a Dream

Darren Aronofsky allows but four people to invade the visual wizardry that is both the framework and seeming raison d'etre of his second directorial outing Requiem For a Dream. Co-adapting the novel of the same name with its author Hubert Selby, Jr., the same writer responsible for the equally downbeat Last Exit to Brooklyn (filmed over a decade ago with Jennifer Jason Leigh delivering a daringly sacrificial performance as Tralala, a prostitute who retains her innocence and humanity despite the hope-depleting trifecta of whoredom, a lost chance at true love and a gangbang), Aronofsky allows but four people and stubbornly refuses to let them take center stage.

There is, for example, a certain perversity in the fact that he withholds a still shot of Jared Leto's gaunted beauty until at least 10 minutes into the film. For Ellen Burstyn, Aronofsky extends due reverence…but more on that later.

Burstyn portrays Sara Goldfarb, Leto her son Harry who has traded in their on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown television set for money to support his drug habit so often that Sara has taken to putting a lock and chain on it. Not that it does any good: she loves her son, her maternal idealism blinds her to Harry's aimlessness and addiction; she gives him the key and later buys the television back from the pawnbroker for yet another time.

Harry pulls a disappearing act and opts to surround himself with fellow junkies Tyrone C. Love (Scary Movie's Marlon Wayans, displaying an affecting poignancy and solid dramatic skills) and Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly). Harry and Marion, enwombed in their embryonic romance, look to each other for salvation. "You make me feel like a person, like I'm me and I'm beautiful," she whispers. To which he responds: "You're my dream."

For a while, all appears evergreen for the dreaming quartet: the lovers' love deepens, Harry and Tyrone become successful drug dealers; Sara, tapped to appear on a television game show, diets to fit into the red dress her deceased husband favored her in. Yet her regimen of amphetamines leads to addiction and hallucinations, Harry and Tyrone's fortunes reverse and when Harry obliquely persuades Marion to prostitute herself in order to fund a drub buy, their once idealistic romance rapidly disintegrates.

Aronofsky has indisputable visual flair - he and cinematographer Matthew Libatique along with digital artists Jeremy Dawson and Dan Schrecker show off an arsenal of tricks: split screens (most effective during Harry and Marion's hushed post-coital conversations), rapid motion, 360-degree turns with fish-eye lenses - but his stylings lack the excitement that filmmakers like David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson and even Steven Sodebergh generate with their visual flourishes.

What prevents Aronofsky from becoming a truly complete filmmaker is his inadequacy as a storyteller. A storyteller doesn't merely sell the tale with the method of presentation, he sells it by tending to his characters, by allowing the characters to embody the themes because of who they are rather than the themes dictating how they should be. Fine - the quartet all want to be loved, to be safe, and as Aronofsky's headache-producing final montage so glaringly spells out, to return to the security of the womb. The audience is forced to wallow in the characters' emotional and physical degradation and debilitation but Aronofsky's approach renders the audience mere spectators.

The one true moment of connection, presented without the visual fluff that dominates the film, comes courtesy of Burstyn, who hasn't had so substantial a part since her heyday and runs away with it. Prodigal son Harry realizes that his mother is hooked on uppers and advises her to stop the dieting. "I like how I feel," Burstyn's Sara begins, "I like thinking about the red dress and television…and you and your father."

As her confession progresses, she reveals her desperate solitude. Burstyn delivers the words through a forced smile and restrained tears and she conveys Sara's own awareness of her problem: she has ears, she has a heart - she hears her loneliness, feels her despair. Somewhere not so deep within her, she understands that she is clutching on to a dream that'll never be fulfilled - that the dream is dead and the requiem has begun. More than anyone else - Leto's often effective but not entirely successful portrayal of a beautiful loser, Wayans's touching portrayal of a son's love for his mother, Connelly's devastating emotional intimacy - it is for Burstyn's deluded Sara that we mourn.

Requiem For a Dream

Directed by: Darren Aronofsky

Written by: Darren Aronofsky, Hubert Selby, Jr.; adapted from Selby Jr.'s novel