Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Directed by: Darren Aronsofsky
Starring: Jared Leto

***

Drugs are bad. Most people know this. If you didn't prior to seeing Requiem for a Dream, well, then you know now that drugs are bad. This really kind of is the sole message of this film even though you can dissect each character and find the underlying themes throughout. A movie like this only needs one message especially when its attempting one as powerful as it is.

The story surrounds four characters, Harry (Jared Leto), Ty (Marlon Wayans), Marion (Jennifer Connolly) and Sara (Ellen Burstyn). Each character has a drug addiction which leads them to their ultimate consequences. There's not really much else to it, but that's a lot. The most important thing in a film like this is to impact your audience. There a parts of Requiem that really do this well, not even including the very impactful final scene. However, the movie as a whole I think fails to some extent when it comes to this.

This is not to say that the movie itself fails. I think its a very good movie, especially stylistically. The way split screen and rapid cuts and the music (oh, the music is so good) work together to create the paranoia and the inner workings of these characters is brilliant and could not have been done better. However, those split screens, rapid cuts and music (which never seems to cut out) does create kind of a montage/music video type feel to the movie which I think hurts it to some extent. Scenes when Marion stands in front of her mirror motionless while everything around her is motionless forces the audience to sit motionless and only wonder what is going on in her head. These scenes work wonders.

I understand the fast pace and agree that its an important aspect of film's style but the times when the fast pace and slow pace work together are much better than the times I'm overwhelmed by the escalating music and cuts after cuts after cuts.

The character's in this film are all ambitious. They all have something they want but ultimately don't acheive as a result of thier drug addictions which cause their lives to spiral out of control. This in a way is what happened with this film. Its easily one of the most ambitious movies I've ever scene. It has a style and a subject matter rivaled by very few. But that style (like the characters' lifestyles) get in the way.

Its hard for me to criticize the style of this movie because I really like it and I think that it works most of the time. It just gets in the way at the same time. I'm not sure how it could have been fixed or if it should have been done any differently because overvall, Requiem is a really good movie.