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Wikipedia
Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 American drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Marlon Wayans and Jennifer Connelly. The film is based on the novel of the same name written by Hubert Selby, Jr.; Aronofsky and Selby wrote the screenplay. Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance. The film was screened out of competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
The film depicts different forms of addiction, leading to the characters’ imprisonment in a world of delusion and reckless desperation that is subsequently overtaken and devastated by reality
Plot
The film charts three seasons in the lives of Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), her son Harry (Jared Leto), Harry’s girlfriend Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly), and Harry’s friend Tyrone C. Love (Marlon Wayans).
The story begins in summer. Sara Goldfarb, an elderly widow living alone in Brighton Beach,Brooklyn, spends her time watching infomercials on television. After a phone call announces that she will be invited to be a participant on a game show, she becomes obsessed with returning to her appearance in a photograph from Harry's graduation, her proudest moment. In order to fit into her old red dress, the favorite of her deceased husband Seymour, she begins taking a regimen of prescription weight-loss amphetamine pills throughout the day and asedative at night. Despite Harry’s warnings about amphetamine addiction, she passionately insists that the chance to be on television has given her a reason to live. When her invitation does not arrive over the fall, she increases her dosage but begins suffering from amphetamine psychosis, hallucinating that she is the principal subject of the game show and that her refrigerator is a menacing, living monster.
Her son Harry is a heroin addict. Together with his friend Tyrone and his girlfriend Marion — also addicts — he enters the illegal drug trade around Coney Island in an attempt to get rich. With the money they make over the summer, Harry and Marion hope to open a fashion store for Marion’s designs, while Tyrone dreams of making his mother proud by escaping the street. However, at the beginning of fall, Tyrone is caught in the middle of a drug gang assassination, and Harry must use most of their money to post bail. Increasing drug-related violence and arrests begin making it hard to obtain drugs, throwing Harry, Tyrone, and Marion into a state of deprivation. Growing more desperate, Harry convinces Marion to have sex with her psychiatrist in exchange for money, causing a rift in their relationship. Meanwhile, Harry’s arm is becoming infected from unsanitary injection techniques.
Sara’s sanity unravels after she visits the television studio in Manhattan. She is put in a mental institution and undergoes unsuccessful medicative treatment, followed by electroconvulsive therapy. Harry and Tyrone set out for Florida to obtain drugs, but Harry’s increasingly infected arm forces them to visit a hospital in South Carolina, where they are arrested for skipping bail. Tyrone must cope with hard labor,racist prison guards, and drug withdrawal alone, as Harry is taken to a prison hospital to have his arm amputated. Harry has a recurring dream of Marion waiting for him at a pier at Coney Island, but awakens and realizes that he is alone in jail with just one arm. Back in New York City, Marion meets with a pimp, who gives her drugs in exchange for sex and puts her in sex shows to pay for her drug habit.
Lost in misery, each character curls into a fetal position. In Sara’s dream, she wins the game show’s grand prize and meets Harry there. In her fantasy, Harry is a successful businessman and engaged to Marion. Mother and son hug and say how much they love one another through the cheers of the crowd and the glowing stage lights.
[edit]Cast
- Jared Leto as Harry Goldfarb
- Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb
- Jennifer Connelly as Marion Silver
- Marlon Wayans as Tyrone Love
- Christopher McDonald as Tappy Tibbons
- Mark Margolis as Mr. Rabinowitz
- Louise Lasser as Ada
- Marcia Jean Kurtz as Rae
- Sean Gullette as Arnold the Shrink
- Keith David as Big Tim
- Ben Shenkman as Dr. Spencer
- Hubert Selby, Jr. as Laughing Guard
- J.T. Schmidt as Dr. Chaotica
- Nicole Miller as Kat
[edit]Production
The film rights to Selby's book were optioned by Scott Vogel for Truth and Soul Pictures in 1997 prior to the release of Aronofsky's film π.
[edit]Rating
In the United States, the film was originally tagged with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA due to a nude sex scene, but Aronofsky appealed the rating, claiming that cutting any portion of the film would dilute (if not outright destroy) its message. The appeal was denied, however, so Artisan decided to release the film unrated.[3] An edited version of the film was released on video, rated R. This version had the sex scene shortened, along with an earlier scene featuring a closeup of the Jared Leto character mainlining heroin in an infected arm, but kept the rest of the movie identical to the unrated version. This R-rated version was only distributed in video store chains such as Blockbuster as well as some family-oriented department stores such as Target. The edited version contains an alternate title card, featuring the words "Requiem for a Dream Edited Version," ensuring that the viewer is aware that the version they are watching is not the original.
In the DVD commentary, Aronofsky implies the "ass-to-ass" scene was based on something he actually witnessed; in the book, the particulars of Marion's prostitution are not described.
[edit]Themes
The majority of reviewers characterized Requiem for a Dream in the genre of "drug movies," along with films like Trainspotting, Spun, andFear and Loathing in Las Vegas.[4][5] However, Aronofsky has said:[6]
| “ | Requiem for a Dream is not about heroin or about drugs… The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, what is a drug?' The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person's head when they're trying to quit drugs, as with cigarettes, as when they're trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. I thought it was an idea that we hadn't seen on film and I wanted to bring it up on the screen. | ” |
In the book, Selby refers to the "American Dream" as amorphous and unattainable, a compilation of the various desires of the story's characters.
[edit]Style
 One of the filmmaking techniques in Requiem for a Dream is the use of rapid cuts or a hip hop montage. Whenever the characters use street drugs, a rapid succession of images illustrates their transition from sobriety to intoxication. In this scene, Harry and Tyrone deal drugs and Marion uses cocaine while she designs clothes. The speed of the footage and the cuts alternates as the characters become intoxicated and sober. | |
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As in his previous film, Pi, Aronofsky uses montages of extremely short shots throughout the film (sometimes termed a hip hop montage).[4] While an average 100-minute film has 600 to 700 cuts,[7] Requiem features more than 2,000. Split-screen is used extensively, along with extremely tight closeups.[4][8] Long tracking shots (including those shot with an apparatus strapping a camera to an actor, called the Snorricam) and time-lapse photography are also prominent stylistic devices.[9]
In order to portray the shift from the objective, community-based narrative to the subjective, isolated state of the characters' perspectives, Aronofsky alternates between extreme closeups and extreme distance from the action and intercuts reality with a character's fantasy.[8]Aronofsky aims to subjectivise emotion, and the effect of his stylistic choices is personalisation rather than alienation.[9]
The film's distancing itself from empathy is furthered structurally by the use of intertitles (Summer, Fall, Winter), marking the temporal progress of addiction.[9] The average scene length shortens as the movie progresses (beginning around 90 seconds to two minutes) until the movie's climactic scenes, which are cut together very rapidly (many changes per second) and are accompanied by a score which increases in intensity accordingly. After the climax, there is a short period of serenity, during which idyllic dreams of what may have been are juxtaposedwith portraits of the four shattered lives.[8]
[edit]Reception
The film received positive responses from critics, with the film aggregator website, Rotten Tomatoes, giving the film a 78% "Certified Fresh" rating, with the camera work and the individual performances particularly praised.[10] Film critic James Berardinelli considered Requiem for a Dream as the second best film of the decade[citation needed].
[edit]Soundtrack
Main articles: Requiem for a Dream (soundtrack) and Lux Aeterna (Requiem for a Dream)
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The soundtrack was composed by Clint Mansell with the string ensemble performed by Kronos Quartet. It is notable for its use of sharp string instruments to create a cold and discomforting sound from instruments frequently used for their warmth and softness. The string quartet arrangements were written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang.
The soundtrack has been widely praised and has subsequently been used in various forms in trailers for other films, including The Da Vinci Code, Sunshine, Lost, I Am Legend, Babylon A.D., and Zathura. A version of the recurring theme was reorchestrated for the film trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.[11]
The soundtrack also confirmed its popularity with the remix album Requiem for a Dream: Remixed, which contains new mixes of the music by Paul Oakenfold, Josh Wink, Jagz Kooner, and Delerium, among others.
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