Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Official trailer

Summer

The film is divided into three seasons: summer, fall and winter. In summer, everything looks possible. Harry Goldfarb and his best friend, Tyrone, are small-time heroin users with a plan to buy a large amount of pure heroin, cut it, sell it and get rich. Harry’s girlfriend, Marion, dreams of opening a clothing shop. The money starts coming in. They’re happy.

Harry’s mother, Sara, a lonely widow in a Brighton Beach apartment, spends her days watching television.

One day, she gets a phone call telling her she’s been selected to appear on her favorite game show. She’s overjoyed. She wants to wear the red dress she wore to Harry’s high school graduation, but it doesn’t fit anymore, so she goes to a doctor, who prescribes her diet pills.

Darren Aronofsky made it in 2000, adapting Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel, and it’s a film that starts with hope and takes every bit of it away. I think it’s close to perfect, and I also think it’s cruel, and I can’t separate those two feelings while it plays. I admire it far more than I could ever call it enjoyable.

Sara

Ellen Burstyn plays Sara, and few performances ever filmed are this devastating. At first, she’s sweet, funny and lonely, a widow whose whole world has shrunk to her television and the other women on the benches outside her building. The idea of being on TV, of being seen, gives her a reason to live.

Then the pills start working, and they start taking her apart. She loses weight, she gets jittery, she stops sleeping. When the pills stop working as well, she takes more. Her refrigerator starts to growl at her and lurch across the kitchen floor. The game show host starts appearing in her living room. Burstyn plays her descent with terrifying commitment, from cheerful hope to paranoia and madness, and it’s almost unbearable to watch.

Her monologue to Harry, explaining why being on television matters so much to her, is one of the saddest scenes in film. Madness has nothing to do with it. She’s alone, and she wants somebody to smile at her. Burstyn earned an Oscar nomination. She should have won.

Burstyn is the reason this film gets a 9 from me. I can take the needles and the rotting arm. What I can barely sit through is a sweet widow who can’t fit into her red dress, backing away from a refrigerator that’s come alive, and Burstyn never once asks for pity while it happens.

Harry, Marion and Tyrone

Jared Leto plays Harry, and he’s good, charming and increasingly desperate, a young man who loves his mother and keeps pawning her television for drug money. Jennifer Connelly plays Marion, whose talent and dreams collapse as her addiction takes over. Marlon Wayans plays Tyrone, and he’s a revelation in a serious role, warm and funny and doomed, a long way from Scary Movie.

The three of them are likeable, and that’s what makes their fall so hard to watch.

Harry and Marion’s early scenes together, talking about the future and her plans for a clothing shop, are tender and hopeful, full of small jokes and private promises. The film wants you to remember how they looked in summer, so that winter hurts all the more. They have plans, they love each other and they’re not bad people. The drugs take everything they have, slowly at first and then all at once.

The Style

Aronofsky tells the story with an aggressive, jittery visual style that nobody who’s seen the film forgets. Every time someone takes a drug, the film cuts to a rapid, almost percussive montage of extreme close-ups: the pills, the needle, dilating pupils, all with sharp sound effects. The montages repeat throughout, getting faster and more frantic as the addictions deepen.

He uses split screens, time-lapse, fish-eye lenses and a camera strapped to the actors’ bodies, and the film has far more cuts than an ordinary drama. It’s exhausting, and it’s meant to be, every bit of it. You feel the characters’ highs and their crashes in your own body.

This is the one area where I’d push back. The montages are thrilling early on, and by the last act I think they tip into showing off. Aronofsky could have trimmed a third of them and lost nothing, and the film would feel a little less like it’s grabbing me by the collar.

Lux Aeterna

Clint Mansell’s score, performed by the Kronos Quartet, became famous far beyond the film. Its main theme, Lux Aeterna, a mournful, repeating string figure, builds and builds as the film goes on, until it becomes almost unbearable. The theme went on to be used in countless trailers, commercials and sports broadcasts, often for things that have nothing to do with addiction, and a reorchestrated version turned up in the trailer for a Lord of the Rings film. In the film, it’s the sound of inevitable disaster.

Mansell’s theme is my favorite thing in the film after Burstyn. It’s a handful of notes on strings that keeps climbing, and it had me dreading what was coming long before the plot got there. It also makes me roll my eyes whenever a sports broadcast borrows it to sell a big game.

Fall and Winter

By fall, things start to go wrong. The heroin supply dries up. Harry and Tyrone’s money runs out. Marion, desperate, starts trading herself for drugs. Sara’s diet pills have turned her world into a nightmare. The characters start to come apart, together and separately.

By winter, the film becomes a horror movie. Harry’s arm, infected from injections, is rotting. Tyrone is arrested and thrown into a brutal Southern prison. Marion, broken, attends a degrading sex party to get drugs. Sara, wandering Manhattan in her red dress, is committed to a psychiatric hospital and given electroshock treatment.

Curled Up

The final sequence cuts between all four characters as they hit bottom at the same moment, and then, one by one, each of them curls up into a fetal position.

Harry in a hospital bed. Tyrone in a prison cot. Marion on her sofa. Sara in her hospital room, dreaming she’s won the game show and Harry is there to cheer her on.

Cinema has few endings this shattering. There’s no hope, no redemption, no lesson spelled out. The film simply shows what’s left of four people who wanted something better, and then it cuts to black. It stays with you for days.

Addiction Without a Sermon

Requiem for a Dream is often shown as a warning about drugs, and it works as one. It’s also cleverer than a simple anti-drug message, because Sara’s addiction starts with prescription pills and a dream of television fame. Her dependency is legal, respectable and prescribed by a doctor, and it destroys her as surely as heroin destroys her son.

Selby’s point, and Aronofsky’s, is that addiction is really about hunger: for love, for success, for being seen. The drugs are just the means. Everybody in the film wants something, and the wanting kills them.

Rating Battle

In the United States, the film received an NC-17 rating for its graphic content. That would have limited where it could be shown. The studio appealed, lost and released it unrated instead. It still found an audience and became a cult film, especially among younger viewers. Its reputation has only grown since. It turns up on every list of the most disturbing films ever made, and Burstyn’s performance is widely considered among the greatest of her career.

Selby’s Novel

Hubert Selby Jr. wrote the novel in 1978, and it’s written in a rush of run-on sentences and unpunctuated dialogue, as if the characters’ thoughts are tumbling out faster than they can control them. Selby knew his subject. He’d struggled with addiction himself, and his books, including Last Exit to Brooklyn, were famous for their unflinching look at people on the edges of American life.

Aronofsky kept the novel’s structure and its bleakness, and he found a visual equivalent for Selby’s breathless prose. Selby co-wrote the screenplay and appears briefly in the film as a prison guard, laughing at Tyrone. It’s a faithful adaptation of a book many people thought couldn’t be filmed.

After Pi

Requiem was Aronofsky’s second film, after the low-budget black-and-white thriller Pi, and it announced him as one of the boldest directors of his generation. He went on to make The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Mother! and The Whale, and several of those films share Requiem’s preoccupation with obsession and the destruction of the body.

Watching Requiem now, you can see the whole of his career in it: the intense close-ups, the relentless pace, the characters driven by a single consuming desire. It’s still the purest expression of his style, and possibly his best film.

Once Is Enough

It’s relentless. There’s almost no relief, the final act is harrowing and some scenes are very graphic. Many people who admire it say they never want to watch it again. The visual style can feel heavy-handed, and the characters’ descent, though powerful, is almost too tidy in its symmetry.

The symmetry is a bigger flaw than the graphic material. Four people curling into the same position at the same moment is powerful, and it’s also a little too neat, as if the film is underlining its own point. It barely dents what the film does to me.

Craft Note

How well does Requiem for a Dream (2000) hold up?

I give Requiem for a Dream a 9 because I can’t stop thinking about it.

Ellen Burstyn’s Sara breaks my heart, Clint Mansell’s score disturbs me, and that final cut between four people curled up alone leaves me hollowed out for days. I’d recommend it to anyone who can take it, with the warning that it offers no comfort at all. Very few people want to see it twice, and I don’t blame them.

Frequently Asked Questions