Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is on a short list of incomparably corny and overwrought yet ultimately successful (on their own terms) films from around the turn of the millennium; you can also point to The Boondock Saints, American History X, and Magnolia, and your mileage will almost certainly vary. Magnolia has some high-highs, some of the best of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career, but it’s saddled with an unbearable orchestral score and some atrocious and pathetic writing; still, the opening 20 minutes, along with the Aimee Mann singalong, and the deus ex machina frog ending remain some of the best filmmaking of Anderson’s career. Requiem, like The Boondock Saints and American History X, was something of a rite of passage for Millennial movie fans in their teens: like Magnolia, it was baldly ambitious and self-assured, a drug addict quartet propelled from heaven into Hell by constant rapid-fire cuts and thousands of inserts, from extreme close-ups of pupils dilating to coke being sniffed to the click of a TV remote. The MTV cutting, along with the film’s grim NOT EVEN ONCE tone, dates it precisely to the year 2000, and while it’s impossible to receive it the same way now, Requiem hasn’t diminished, unlike Magnolia.
Based on Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel and from a script cowritten by Selby Jr. and Aronofsky, Requiem for a Dream follows Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans), and Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), working-class New Yorkers living small, narrow lives in the outer boroughs. Sara, a widow with a conniving drug addict for a son, spends all of her time sunbathing with other neighborhood yentas and watching TV. Christopher Macdonald plays the host of her favorite program, a motivational weight loss lecture show. There are guests, but we barely see them; nevertheless, one day Sara gets a phone call from the network informing her that she’s “already won,” and that once she fills out some forms and sends some money in, she’ll finally be on TV.
It’s obviously a scam, but her friends are none the wiser, and after a suggested diet of grapefruit, coffee, and a single egg leaves Sara listless, she goes to a pill farm. The doctor doesn’t even look up from his clipboard before prescribing uppers and downers for weight loss; when Sara calls in reporting decreased efficacy and disturbing side effects (her refrigerator is suddenly angry), she’s brushed off and told to keep taking the pills. Meanwhile, her son Harry, his on-off girlfriend Marion, and best friend Tyrone go through a typical hard drug fall, copping and then failing to cop and then dealing and then trying to deal and getting thrown in prison; eventually, Harry develops a nasty abscess and has to have his arm amputated, while Tyrone ends up in prison for years. Marion prostitutes herself and ends up in a bizarre underground sex show full of businessmen where she has to go “ass-to-ass” with another woman and a giant dildo. Remarkably, she’s the one that gets off easy.
Harry may be missing an arm and stuck in prison with Tyrone, but Sara’s the real tragedy in Requiem for a Dream: undone by amphetamine psychosis, she ends up wandering the streets of New York and inadvertently gets institutionalized; by the time the yentas come to visit her, she’s a husk, a victim of unnecessary electroshock treatment. She stays in the hospital and the yentas cry together on a bench outside.
Requiem for a Dream takes itself very seriously without having much new to say or show about drug addiction; at the same time, its craft level is so high that you can’t help but become engrossed, so precise and dynamic are its compositions and montage. Aronofsky has proven time and time again that he’s not all that bright—or deep—but the motherfucker knows how to make a movie, at least the kind of movie that was taken for granted in 2000 and may be falling by the wayside in the post-Obsession landscape. Visually, it’s a show-off piece, the most elaborate film of Aronofsky’s career, including his sci-fi follow-up The Fountain and the Biblical epic Noah. 2022’s The Whale won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, but it was also widely mocked by people who couldn’t stomach the film’s operatic emotional register. It’s a film where dark dramatic strings play over Fraser’s morbidly obese protagonist pouring ranch dressing and pizza cheese down his throat, but I was totally taken with it, swept away and nearly moved to tears by the angelic ending. If Generation Z can’t stand underscoring, how can you expect them to take Aronofsky’s fire and brimstone pose seriously?
Last year’s Caught Stealing was a nice diversion, nothing more than another New York crime drama, but it barely registered with audiences or critics. Black Swan is Aronofsky’s widely recognized masterpiece, and while it’s far better than Requiem, the latter has suffered from its reputation as a “dorm room poster” movie. Pulp Fiction and Brian De Palma’s Scarface are the kings of this particular genre, but their popularity transcends the dorms. Requiem for a Dream is still “a teenager’s favorite movie,” thoroughly obvious and fast-paced enough to stymie any ADD, but it remains a superior teenager’s favorite movie, unlike Magnolia and Garden State.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM