To paraphrase Rachel House from Hunt For The Wilderpeople, that Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) is a bad egg. Dude steals to make money and he's always getting doped up in his free time, all stuff his mom, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), just brushes under the rug. Harry's ambitions are growing though and he and his pal Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans) concoct a plan to sell drugs and make themselves a steady fortune, which is particularly good news for Harry's also drug fixated girlfriend Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly).
Meanwhile, Sara Goldfarb has her own problems to deal with as she's learned she's been set to appear on a local TV show, one that she wants to look her best for. She decides the best way to do this is to lose weight fast and after trying more traditional routes like dieting, she soon gets hooked on weight loss pills in a very dangerous way. While all four of these primary players have their own clearly articulated ambitions in life they wish ever so much to obtain, over the course of Requiem For A Dream their pursuits for a brighter future will tragically only lead them each to unique versions of inevitable chaos and ruination.
Some movies are thought of as deconstruction pieces but Requiem For A Dream is a full-on destruction piece if there ever was on. Going into the movie with no clear idea of what exactly its plot was, I was shocked to discover it's entirely a character-centric piece following the downfall of four individuals whose tone increases in bleakness as it goes on. The script by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky fully commits to a dark atmosphere that holds back no punches for these characters and their suffering. In going down this storytelling path, you do get some moments where Requiem For A Dream totally feel like it's falling into the trap of just being gratuitous for the sake of being gratuitous but even there there's a boldness to its unflinching depiction of torment that's fascinating to watch.
The screenplays decision to play this story out across three different seasons is why the agony-ridden character arcs in the story come off as successful in execution far more often than not. There's a sense of build-up, of small actions building on each other before they coalesce into something awful in the way the script is smartly structured that mirrors how reality itself functions. Once we get to the climax and see what kind of physical toll Sara's addiction to drugs has taken on her, one can't help but be taken aback. Of course, the way Sara's gradual transformation from stereotypical elderly person to mentally hindered drug addict owes a great deal of debt to Ellen Burstyn and the phenomenal performance she gives to this character.
In the aforementioned scene showing what Sara is like after months of addiction, my heart was just breaking for her thanks to the realistic way Burstyn portrays her characters now damaged mental state that has hindered her grasp on reality. Also turning in good work is Jennifer Connelly, who takes what seems like a thinly written girlfriend character and then, as the movie begins to give her more and more standalone screentime, begins to make Marion Silver more of her own troubled human being. Shockingly, Marlon Wayans Jr. works extremely well as a dramatic actor while Jared Leto turns out to be the major weak link in the case with his generic performance standing out in a cast that's turning in some truly intriguing takes on addiction. Admittedly, his characters handily the worst-written of the main four characters but it's still disappointing how little Leto brings to the roles.
Our four leads, as well as the various supporting characters, are framed through a visual style that heavily emphasizes rapid-fire editing that lends the entire motion picture its own idiosyncratic sense of energy as it whizzes on from one shot to the next in a quick-footed manner. There's also some delightfully unorthodox camerawork in here that means there's an unmistakable sense of versatility in the way Requiem For A Dream is filmed. You've got some scenes filmed in more traditional manners, others that are filmed in a way that emphasize the fractured mindset of Sara Goldfarb and even one scene that's filmed in a manner that has one visible character moving amidst a crowd of blurry bystanders that distinctly evokes Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express! As you can likely guess, Requiem For A Dream is a thoroughly bold motion picture through and through, though I do wish beyond words it could have had a lead performance that wasn't so forgettable.
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