An attempt to show an intimate human experience as a physical manifestation on the big screen, is always a difficult task. One way to do it, is to make a voice over that sort of to explain it to the audience. A better way, in my opinion, is to try and recreate the visual experience as close to the actual experience, and let that be the form of the presentation. "Requiem For A Dream" follows the latter path and succeeds in many ways in achieving exactly what it sets out to achieve.
Now I will first of all state, that I have no personal idea of how it feels to be an addict, at least not on the level of the four "junkies" portrayed here. So I guess it is a very subjective statement, in my case, to state that the movie succeeds in its portrait. But so far, as it really affected me, how the cinematography really made me feel a growing blend of misery and disconnection, I hazard the guess, that this is pretty much the way it must feel to be a junkie.
I never liked Trainspotting much, because of its tendency to wrap such a serious subject in humor. It is a general tendency of British cinema and even if it is entertaining, it does not suck you into the "experience" quite the same way that Requiem does. And that is what art should do - transport you into the experience of another person and the way they experience their world (so to say).
Another good point of Requiem is, that it does not only comment on the obvious types of addictions, but also the addiction to living through television and its promises of a better life and ideals of the human body. The things you buy and eat and so on become those ideals and potentially gets you your 15 mins of fame for complying with those ideals.
The plot as such is not important, other than to have some place to let the story unfold. It centers around a young man Harry played by Jared Leto, his girlfriend Marion played by Jennifer Connelly, his black friend Tyrone and his mother Sara played brilliantly by Ellen Burstyn. At the outset everything looks sort of like a "normal" dysfunctional family, but as we get to know them a bit more, we lift the lid on their addictions.
The three young drug addicts sort of have their similar slide into self destruction and how it alienate them from their own life and each other, while we get a different and better portrayed idea of the cancerous lack of self worth and food+television addiction of the mother. It is brilliantly put together the way that everything blends into a mental nightmare that portrays an obsession of the subjects shown. They are just fleeting ideas the victim self inflicts in order to keep some sort of hold of something of value to them.
But their connection to rationality or their ideas of self worth or ability to create money out of ridiculous schemes, just adds to the sense of being pathetic, when they cannot do anything else, but face their limitations - only to slide deeper into their poisonous addictions. There is only one way and that is to go to rock bottom and a possibly rebirth into a new life - if they can face their own weaknesses. The fetal position they all enter into at the end, extends this notion of catharsis.
It does have that 90´s feel to it and the acting of Leto and Connolly is not the best cinema has to offer, so I never really get under their skin. Tyrone´s character seems misplaced a bit to be honest and I fear that he is there because of race politics. But anyway, what brings this movie considerably above the average is the editing and the brilliant cinematography infusing the downward spiral notion. It is probably the best case of that notion in movie history. Add to that a very good performance from Ellen Burstyn, that leverages the average acting to the upper echelons also. She should have got an Oscar.
8/10