Review of Requiem for a Dream (2000) by Jacob G — 30 Sep 2013

Is it weird that my biggest takeaway from Requim For A Dream is that Jennifer Connelly was the most beautiful woman alive in 2000? Crikey, my heart.

Anyway, the movie never mentions the drug being abused by Harry/Tyrone/Marion; she's almost definitely on coke, my best guess for Harry/Tyrone is shooting meth, though it could also be coke. Again, movie doesn't say. What I can say with relative confidence is that it isn't heroin as various reviews/Flixter description states. Heroin won't make your pupils larger, it'll make them small as pinpricks. And Aronofsky doesn't strike me as a director to make that kind of detail-oriented mistake. Plus, this simply doesn't feel like heroin.

But the true beauty of Requiem for a Dream is that it doesn't matter what drugs are being used and abused. That there is an anti-drug moral here feels more a function of telling a realistic story, not agenda on the part of the filmmaker. Yet that doesn't lessen the impact of seeing the spiral as the drugs control the users more and more.

Nowhere is this communicated as intently as through the story of Sara Goldfarb: mother to Harry, watcher of television, and isolated from society. The heart-wrenching element to her story is that she never decides to take drugs, they're prescribed to her. She's of the old school where if it's from a doctor, it can't hurt you. Whereas if she'd gotten the same thing on the street from a shady fellow in a trenchcoat, it'd be an evil thing.

The drugs crush potential, too. Ok, maybe Harry or Tyrone or Sara don't have much potential. But Marion seems to be on a trajectory where she could do art and make money and be somebody. Yet the drugs take her down, too. Her downfall is perhaps the softest--if prostitution can be considered soft.

And all of this is told in Aronofsky's distinctive cinema. It's a beautifully shot film. And the music is top-notch, perfectly fitting the mood.