Movie Review: 'Requiem for a Dream' (2000)

Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream may be one of the most disturbing movies ever made (it could upset some viewers even more than A Clockwork Orange or Natural Born Killers did), yet it's impossible to take your eyes off it. Based on the 1978 novel by Hubert Selby Jr., the movie, a full-throttle mind- bender, is hypnotically harrowing and intense, a visual and spiritual plunge into the seduction and terror of drug addiction. Aronofsky interconnects the tales of four desperate, outer-borough New York nobodies who fall prey, in different ways, to the slavery of substance abuse. Three of them are hipster junkies, but the movie, in all likelihood, will be best remembered for Ellen Burstyn's role as a sad, matronly Brighton Beach yenta who gets hooked on diet pills. Aronofsky, in a virtuoso act of bad-trip perversity, literally turns her world inside out, fusing the audience with a soul that has lost its contours (but not its desire to be loved).

So much for the youth-chic glamour of drugs! Some viewers, and more than a few critics, are likely to accuse Requiem for a Dream of being ''manipulative,'' of dressing up primal-kick exploitation voyeurism as gutter art. In a year, however, when American pop culture is being called on the carpet for its violence and extremity, Aronofsky has made one of the rare dark-as-midnight movies that finds its unholy essence — and, in a strange way, its morality — by going ''too far,'' by depicting the unspeakable without a safety net of restraint. As Requiem unspools, one's dread surges forward with a kind of cathartic and terrified amazement. Those willing to take the journey may feel as if they're not so much trapped as hooked — addicted to the images that are addling the characters' brains.

This is only Aronofsky's second feature, after [Pi] (1998), the low-budget indie novelty hit of flashy, Kafka-goes-downtown paranoia, but as a filmmaker he has now made a dazzling, bravura leap. He has developed a powerfully unsettling style of freakout sensuality, complete with it-came-from-the-id hallucinations, nerve-twitching spatial-temporal zigzags, stroboscopic montages of ritual drug use (syringe!/sigh!/dilated pupil!), and a clinical shock-cut intensity that makes you feel as if the characters' psyches had merged with your own. Aronofsky was recently tapped to direct the fifth Batman film; if he brings anything approaching this level of creative ferocity to the reimagination of that series, he could help reenergize mainstream movies.

Jared Leto, all sinew and pale skin, has the pivotal role of Harry Goldfarb, a Brooklyn thrill seeker in his early 20s whose only ambition is to shoot up as often as possible. There's an authentic scruffy anonymity to the way that Harry and his buddy Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) laugh and shimmy to a hip-hop groove as the heroin gets a grip on their blood. The two hatch a plan to hustle dope on the street, all so they can purchase a stash of pure heroin, and the film gets us right on their wavelength of snaky, urban-underworld pleasure and deceit. Harry also has a girlfriend, Marion, played by Jennifer Connelly, whose flash-eyed voluptuous beauty is, for the first time, matched by her radiant command as an actress. Marion, a pampered girl who wants to design clothes, gets hooked on smack as well, and the gradual transformation she undergoes, from caressing lover to selfish, clawing dope fiend to dead-hearted prostitute willing to do anything, is a slow descent into pure degraded madness.