Requiem for a Dream Is?ro;”Surprise?ro;”a Good Arty Hipster Drug Film

Adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1978 novel, Requiem for a Dream is a stylish, bleak, mesmerizing film about the lives of drug addicts in Coney Island. Assuming that description will make most readers mutter, "Dear God, not another arty drug movie," and turn the page, I should say right off the bat that I went in sharing your skepticism. The fact that this is an ambitious young filmmaker's second movie?Darren Aronofsky's debut was the low-budget black-and-white mathematical thriller ¹?only added to the feeling of dread: second films by talented filmmakers are often overlong, unfocused and nowhere near as artful and important as they think. The cast was another red flag?a lot of promising but underused younger actors and one great, underused veteran (Ellen Burstyn), all of whom were no doubt eager to sink their chops into a "powerful" tale of addiction.

I thought the film overcame all these handicaps and more. Like a lot of recently arrived Hot Young Directors, including David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson, Aronofsky is fascinated by form and style; Requiem is a virtual encyclopedia of showy filmic effects?time lapse, slow motion, flash-cuts, tilted angles, dissonant sound effects, enormous closeups of disconnected bits of text, even sequences in which actors move around while being photographed with cameras strapped to their torsos. Yet unlike, say, Anderson's Magnolia?which had so much stylishness and so few un-cliched things to say about human nature that trying to find substance in its three-hour running was like trolling the floor of a heavily chlorinated pool in search of a dropped nickel?Requiem is a tight, hypnotic, almost ruthlessly focused piece of work. It knows what it wants to say and how and why it wants to say it.

All the individual details?performances, music, sets, costumes, camera moves, recurring images?reinforce the film's view of addictive behavior as an escape from daily life, responsibility and the ravages of money and time. The result suggests a less glib, wiser version of Trainspotting, or the sort of drug movie Peter Greenaway might make if he had a sense of rhythm and thought actors were something other than furniture.

The cast of characters includes a number of desperate working-class people eking out a hard living on the bleak streets of Brooklyn. The closest thing to a lead character is Sara Goldfarb (Burstyn), a heavy-set, elderly shut-in who begins the film with just one addiction, television. Her favorite program is a weight-loss infomercial (featuring the great character actor Chris McDonald, unexcelled at conveying phony showbiz sincerity). When she gets a call from a game show asking if she wants to be a guest, she becomes obsessed with slimming down so that everyone who sees her on the tube will marvel at how good she looks. A visit to a shady doctor yields a prescription for adrenaline-jacking amphetamines.

In a devastating scene, Sara's heroin junkie son, Harry (Jared Leto, emaciated, soulful and bracingly honest), hears her nervously grinding her teeth, instantly deduces that she's hooked on speed and is shocked to realize that he's changed places with his mother. In the opening scenes, she was the responsible, empathetic, walked-on person in their relationship?an incredulous old woman nervously listening behind a locked door as Harry stole yet another of her tv sets to pawn for junk money. Now she's as bad off as Harry, and we don't need dialogue to tell us that he blames his own bad example; Leto's horrified face, showcased in one of Aronofsky's many luminous closeups, gets the point across just fine.

Harry has a girlfriend, Marion Silver (the superb Jennifer Connelly), and a best pal and running buddy, Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans, also superb?did Aronofsky hand out excellence pills on the set?). As the film unfolds, they move from desperation and grinding poverty into scheming success as low-level drug dealers, then spiral inexorably downward until they're so miserable, scared and degraded they can barely think straight. Though this narrative arc is familiar, it gains fresh urgency thanks to the cast's blunt, emotionally direct performances and Aronofsky's cunning use of tight, brief closeups. The director and his cinematographer, the talented Matthew Libatique, fill their compositions with colors and shades that simultaneously suggest both exhilaration and decay. The dominant emotions experienced by addicts?soul-numbing despair and crackpot optimism?coexist within the same instant, each obscuring and then revealing the other.

The style of Requiem is bold, original and self-conscious enough to inspire either adoration or disgust; I doubt anyone will come out of it thinking, "Well, that was all right." Blood flows freely. There's nudity galore (and one powerful, intensely degrading sex scene that earned the movie an NC-17; the distributor has instead released it unrated). An infected needle mark grows into a pustulant Krakatoa; Sara's locked refrigerator sprouts fangs and lunges at her, roaring like a T. rex. Aronofsky doesn't do anything the easy way?even things that cry out for simplicity. For instance, most directors would convey the passage of time with a cut or a simple dissolve; Aronofsky stages high-speed, self-contained mini-movies. At one point, he shows Sara obsessively cleaning her small apartment in a time lapse sequence that looks like it must have taken at least a day to shoot. To wow us a little further, he moves the camera laterally through the room, producing an elegant, time-lapse tracking shot.

The vibe is New York to the bone?Aronofsky is a Brooklynite and Selby fanatic?yet, paradoxically, the events also feel as though they could be taking place in any city in any decade, or even inside our own dreaming minds. Aronofsky intentionally avoids specificity in other ways as well?stocking the sets with a mix of old and new devices, and preserving as much of Selby's circa-1978 slang as he can without crossing the line into nostalgia. He collapses time and space through cutting, often employing superfast montages of very quick closeups to suggest how time flies when you're doing drugs.

Some of Aronofsky's editing choices are so abstract and self-conscious that they return us to the early roots of cinema language?to the Kuleshov experiment and Eisenstein's theories of montage, which likened juxtaposed cuts to images in a rebus: man plus sandwich equals "this man is hungry," and so forth. It's as poetic as it is mathematical. Sometimes it backfires and makes Aronofsky look like a showoff kid who can't control his talent. Other times it edges on brilliance?particularly a light-speed montage of addiction rituals that rightfully suggests that heroin and caffeine, while not exactly the same thing, blur time and encourage introspection in similar ways. The director seems like the kind of guy who'd drive clear around the block to get to the house next door. He has to keep pushing because he wants every second to be either involving or surprising, ideally both; if you hate what he's doing, that's okay, as long as you're involved. He has style to burn, and he makes sure to spritz it with lighter fluid every chance he gets.

Framed

Though American movies are bad this year, the supporting performances have been terrific. There are so many memorable ones so far that I can't imagine how the Oscar folks will be able to choose for those 10 nomination slots.

Jeff Bridges deserves a nod for The Contender, playing a memorably odd president who mixes Nixon's political savvy, Reagan's folksiness and Clinton's super-slick charisma. Costar Sam Elliott deserves acclaim for the same movie. Ellen Burstyn deserves some kind of award for her work in Requiem for a Dream?not just a Best Actress or Supporting Actress nomination, though she certainly qualifies for either, but also a medal for devoted service to a filmmaker's vision. Burstyn is edging up on 70, yet here she is going all out for a talented newcomer, enduring physical discomforts that would put the fear of God in Jackie Chan. Like the other actors in Requiem, she offers herself up as raw material: clay to be molded as the film sees fit. Her humility amplifies her talent; despite Aronofsky's directorial stunt work, or perhaps because of it, Burstyn's performance is her most transparent and moving since 1980's Resurrection.