Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Still a disturbing, hypnotic portrayal of addiction in a couple of forms.

The movie follows four people in Brooklyn - Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his closest friend Tyrone. Harry, Marion, and Tyrone are all heroin addicts who have plans to become dealers and attain some self-sufficiency; maybe even get rich. Sara is obsessed with getting on television, in particular on a self-help show focused on looking better. To do so, she begins a ruthless regimen of diet pills that results in erratic behavior and a fracturing of her mind. By tale's end, all four people are horribly broken: Sara is in a psychiatric institution after a complete mental breakdown; Harry has had his arm amputated due to an untreated infection from his intravenous drug use; Marion has taken to completely sexually degrading herself for heroin, and Tyrone has landed in prison.

A simple summary of this story doesn't come close to conveying this film's strengths. This was Darren Aronofsky's second feature-length film, after his brilliant, claustrophobic, black-and-white Pi, about a harried mathematician. With Requiem for a Dream, he took his artistic skills to draw a frantic parallel between addiction to hard drugs and addiction to seemingly innocuous substances like television or diet pills. Unlike most "drug" movies, this one doesn't end with a third-act redemption. The quartet of addicts all hit rock-bottom, at least one of them irrevocably, and that's where the story ends. Even the then-controversial and surprisingly popular Trainspotting - which predated Requiem by a few years - had a more uplifting ending. Aronofsky's film does depict the apparent bliss that addicts feel when they get their fix, be it hard drugs or less obvious means of stimulation, but those euphoric moments are brief and easily forgotten by the film's end.

This description should make it clear that this is not an "entertaining" film. It's never fun to watch people fall into pits of addiction from which they won't or almost certainly won't save themselves. This is why I've only seen this movie twice - the first time in 2002 and then again 18 years later. It's just tough to stomach in many ways. Still, there is an artistry and skill to its execution that I had to see again, and I'm glad that I did. As hard as it is to watch, I have to admire how the story puts TV and diet pill addiction on the same level as heroin addictions, and arguably has worse consequences for its victim, Sara. And the cinematic techniques used to convey the sense of paranoia, panic, and fevered desperation that Sara experiences are nerve-wrackingly effective. As her mental state deteriorates, Sara's faded little apartment living room soon feels every bit as confining as a sweatbox at a Floridian penitentiary. With equal skill, the masterful editing of the movie's visuals and sound gives a sense of the shifts between sobriety and intoxication of various characters. It's often amazingly hypnotic, just on an aesthetic level.

Sara chats with her son, Henry, before things start to go
gradually off the rails for both of them. Just one part of
the grand tragedy is that Henry, himself addicted to heroin,
is the only person who later sees the telltale signs of addiction
in his mother.

There did seem to be a bit of buoyancy missing from the movie, mostly in the first act. Not that it was necessary, or that there needed to be much of it, but I couldn't help wonder if spending just a little more time seeing the characters be happy with one another might not have made their tragedies even more poignant. For the most part, we just see them suffering and fairly tense right from the start, and things only get worse as the story unfolds. Part of this feeling probably comes from the fact that the actors do such excellent work, which should come as no shock when you see the cast: Ellen Burstyn was nominated for a ton of awards for her performance as Sara; Jared Leto and Jennifer Connelly play Harry and Marion, and the surprising but highly capable Marlon Wayans plays Tyrone. These four do such great work that, grim as the tale is, it pulls you along in the hopes that somebody manages to escape their fates.

I've long been a huge fan of Darren Aronofsky, and I like every one of his films, to one degree or another. While I don't have Requiem for a Dream among my favorites of his (those would be The Fountain and The Wrestler), Requiem for a Dream is an excellent film on a dark subject. If you're one who isn't put off by difficult, and depressing subject matter, then I recommend that you check this one out. 

Black Swan (2010)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

A meticulously-molded adaptation of the Swan Lake ballet into a psychological horror. I dig it.

The movie follows young ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), an ambitious perfectionist whose dream seems to come true when she is selected to play the lead role of the Swan Queen in her company's new, reimagined version of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet. The big twist is that both the lead role and the role of the antagonist and rival, The Black Swan, will also be played by Nina. The real challenge is for the uptight, extremely conservative Sayers to try and learn how she can let go and play a dark, manipulative, highly sensual character such as The Black Swan. The immense pressure she puts on herself is ratcheted up in the form of Lily (Mila Kunis), a fellow company dancer who seems to embody all of the bold sexuality that the company director wants Nina to show when she plays the Black Swan.

Like nearly all of Aronofsky's movies, I love how he approached this story. While his movies are ostensibly all about very different topics and take place in vastly different worlds and genres, from science fiction to mathematics to drug addiction, they all seem to focus on the psychology of obsessive personalities. Black Swan is no different, looking at how an obsessive perfectionist sees her world start to fall apart as she confronts and tries to embody a character who is more than she can handle. As has often been the case, Natalie Portman handles the strong script exceptionally well (I've always found that she performs up or down to the script she's given), especially when she has to shift between the pristine White and the malevolent Black Swans towards the end of the picture.

Then there is the visual component. I thought Aronofsky and his longtime cinematographer Matthew Libatique translated all of Nina's claustrophia and mania throughout the entire movie. And the surreal visual effects at the end of the movie are done to great effect. These are things that could have come off as silly, but they only enhance the heightened and fractured mental state that Nina is undergoing while she dances on opening night.

This was the second time I'd seen this movie, but it was the first since its theatrical release back in 2010. It holds up, though, just as I've found all of Aronofsky's films do. I believe this is a function of his always imbuing his movies with multiple layers, with at least one of them being themes universal enough that they transcend almost any attempt to date them. Black Swan won't be for everyone. A friend of mine who really loves ballet couldn't shake the fact that the version of the ballet in the movie is a wildly different take on Tchaikovsky's original. Also, the movie is far less about ballet specifically and much more about the drive that can consume a person. The fact that Nina is a ballerina is mostly incidental; she could be the mathematician Max in Pi, Randy "The Ram" in The Wrestler, the titular Biblical prophet in Noah, or any of the protagonists in Aronofsky's movies. But if one doesn't get hung up on the ballet aspect of it too much, and if one is open to dark tales that dig into some twisted psychology, then Black Swan is for you.