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At crucial points, each of the three figures is viewed — pinned — by a fixed camera as they scramble, against a herky-jerky background, to escape some awful destiny. The technique may look familiar (from videos, Spike Lee films, a drunken-party shot in Mean Streets), but I've never seen it used the way that Aronofsky does — to suggest that the characters, through drugs, are severed from their identities, to the point that they appear to be surveying their own self-destruction, as if they were figures in a live video- game. Requiem for a Dream may be the first movie to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.
It's that perception that powers the extraordinary tale of Harry's mother, Sara Goldfarb (Burstyn). Eager to fit into her old red dress, the one her late husband once mooned over, Sara goes to a quack diet doctor, who gives her multicolored pills, and the tangled power surge of uppers and downers begins to interact with her hopes and desires, her fixation on the refrigerator, her habitual viewing of a rah-rah TV infomercial guru. The spiral of surreal paranoia becomes almost too much to bear. Yet Burstyn, in a fearless performance, never lets us forget how deeply Sara's addiction is rooted in the piercing cul-de-sac of her empty-nest loneliness.
Does the movie go too far? In the final montage of devastation, which intercuts the characters' horrific fates, Aronofsky lays on his art with didactic brutality. (I truly could have lived without the electroshock.) In at least one of these segments, however, the movie attains a kind of queasy greatness: We watch as Marion performs at a private sex show, and her willing dehumanization is dramatized, in discreet flash cuts, with a present-tense nightmare intimacy that leaves us speechless. At that moment, we see a character, once alive, who has now abandoned the dream of herself. A
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