The trend of watching films that I really enjoyed a few years ago and now thinking they are actually not very good at all continues with Requiem For A Dream. American Beauty, Donnie Darko, and Dancer in the Dark: none of them are doing it for me these days. I decided that for Requiem, it is because the film seems to be aimed at a younger, MTV minded audience. Which makes sense, and is probably a good thing, given its message is a capslocked “DON’T DO DRUGS.” And this is a good thing to get ingrained into the heads of a young audience, because, clearly, they shouldn’t do drugs. But I wonder, the entire time that I am watching this film, why a filmmaker in his late twenties or early thirties would want to make a film like this after he made such an interesting film about religion and mathematics in Pi. There are those who argue that Requiem is not just about drugs, but about the entire idea of addiction. But I think that is difficult to argue, given that all four of the characters’ downfall is some form of substance abuse.
A very interesting film could have been made by Aronofsky, with these characters, and maybe even based on this book. If we were shown the motivations for the younger characters to be drug dealers, and were given a more plausible, original path in which the characters end up in tragedy, then I could see myself being moved by the film. The only character who comes close to this is Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb. I see that she loves watching television with her lone living room chair stationed directly in front of the television, I can understand her reaction to being notified that she has won a slot on her favorite TV show, I can understand that she wants to be thinner so that she can once again impress people and maybe even find a new man to replace the deceased husband that she so deeply misses. Her methods at attaining all of this are stupid, but believable, and in the end pretty heartbreaking. The younger characters, though, I have no sympathy for. You shoot up in that arm, in that spot again? Of course you deserve to lose your arm. You sell your body for a little bit of coke? Of course you deserve to look like a whore and get fucked in a massive anal orgy. Aronofsky has made one good film to date, The Wrestler, fortunately his more recent one, showing that maybe he is actually learning something from these didactic and unsubtle early films.