Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream

Theatrical poster
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Produced by Eric Watson
Palmer West
Written by Darren Aronofsky
Hubert Selby, Jr.
Starring Ellen Burstyn
Jared Leto
Jennifer Connelly
Marlon Wayans
Music by Clint Mansell
Cinematography Matthew Libatique
Editing by Jay Rabinowitz
Distributed by Artisan Entertainment
Release date(s) October 27, 2000 (2000-10-27)
Running time 102 minutes
Country United States
Language English
Budget $4,500,000
Gross revenue $7,390,108

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., and Aronofsky and Selby co-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 dream world of delusion and reckless desperation that is subsequently overtaken and devastated by reality.[2]

Contents

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). Each character is ultimately destroyed by addiction and self-delusion.

The story begins in summer. Sara Goldfarb, an elderly widow living alone in her Brighton Beach apartment, 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 matching her appearance to a photograph from Harry's graduation, her proudest moment. In order to fit into her old red dress, the favorite of her deceased husband, she begins taking a regimen of prescription weight-loss amphetamine pills throughout the day and a sedative at night. The pills alter her behavior, but she passionately insists that the chance to be on television has given her a reason to live. However, her invitation does not arrive over the fall, and she begins to up her dosage, causing nightmarish hallucinations, where she is the principal subject of the game show.

Her son Harry is a heroin addict. Together with fellow addicts — his friend Tyrone and his girlfriend Marion — he enters the drug trade in an attempt to realize their dreams. 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 escaping the street and making his mother proud. However, at the beginning of fall, Tyrone is caught in the middle of a drug gang assassination, and Harry uses the majority of the money they've earned to bail him out of jail. Meanwhile, because of the arrests and shootings of dealers, it becomes very hard to obtain any drugs, throwing Harry, Tyrone, and Marion into a state of deprivation. Growing more desperate, Harry convinces Marion to get money from her psychiatrist by having sex with him in exchange for money, causing a rift in the relationship. Marion begins prostituting herself and Harry's arm is now severely infected from unsanitary injection techniques.

Sara's sanity unravels after she visits the TV studio and she is put in a mental institution, where she undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. Harry and Tyrone travel to Florida, where they believe they can start over, but Harry's deteriorating condition forces them to visit a hospital in South Carolina, where they are arrested for skipping bail. Harry is taken to a prison hospital due to his arm, which is amputated. Tyrone must deal with racist prison guards, hard labor, and drug withdrawal alone. Harry has a recurring dream of Marion waiting for him at the pier at Coney Island, but awakens and realizes that he is alone, missing an arm, and in jail. Marion meets with a pimp, with whom she has sex in exchange for drugs, and who puts her in sex shows to pay off the debt.

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.

Cast

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. In addition to the film rights of the novel, Aronofsky purchased film rights for Perfect Blue for $59,000 so he could reference a scene from the film shot by shot, within a similar thematic context in Requiem for a Dream.

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, 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 United Kingdom, the film has been given an 18 certificate by the BBFC.

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.

Themes

The majority of reviewers characterized Requiem for a Dream in the genre of "drug movies," along with films like Trainspotting, Spun, and Fear 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.

Style

As in his previous film, π, 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 juxtaposed with portraits of the four shattered lives.[8]

Reception

The film received mostly positive responses from critics, with the film aggregator website, Rotten Tomatoes, giving the film an 78% "Fresh" rating, with the camera work and the individual performances particularly praised.[10] Film critic James Berardinelli chose Requiem for a Dream as his #2 best film of the decade.

Soundtrack

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.

References

  1. ↑ "Festival de Cannes: Requiem for a Dream". festival-cannes.com. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/5199/year/2000.html. Retrieved 2009-10-17. 
  2. ↑ Requiem for a Dream :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
  3. ↑ DAILY NEWS: Artisan Backs Unrated "Requiem"; San Sebastian Lineup Shaping Up
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Booker, M. (2007). Postmodern Hollywood. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0275999009. 
  5. ↑ Boyd, Susan (2008). Hooked. New York: Routledge. pp. 97–98. ISBN 0415957060. 
  6. ↑ http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/int/2000/10/13/aronofsky/
  7. ↑ Requiem for a Dream (2000) - Trivia
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Dancyger, Ken (2002). The Technique of Film and Video Editing. London: Focal. pp. 257–258. ISBN 0240804201. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Powell, Anna (2007). Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 75. ISBN 0748632824. 
  10. ↑ http://uk.rottentomatoes.com/m/requiem_for_a_dream/
  11. ↑ Answer Man rogerebert.com Retrieved on May 2, 2007.

Further reading

External links

Films directed by Darren Aronofsky
Pi (1998) · Requiem for a Dream (2000) · The Fountain (2006) · The Wrestler (2008) · Black Swan (2010)