movie of the week
Author Hubert Selby Jnr is best known for his Last Exit to Brooklyn, a sombre collection of connected stories that was made into a very effective film by Ulrich Edel in 1989. Now Darren Aronofsky, who made the fascinating (that is, Pi, as in the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter), about a mad mathematician’s search for the secret code of the universe, has tackled Selby’s novel Requiem for a Dream.
It is a harrowing book, one of the most harrowing I’ve read. Step by step, Selby tracks the parallel declines of a mother and son into drug addiction and dementia. These two characters reflect Selby’s own battles with prescription and illegal drugs respectively. He is a kind of a religious writer, concerned with salvation and damnation, even if that salvation seems paltry; he treats his characters with great compassion, even if there is no redemption in sight. His style is a densely packed and idiosyncratically punctuated representation of dialect and thought, stream-of-consciousness jostling with speech and authorial narration to make a total onslaught on the reader.
Aronofsky is an appropriate director to tackle such a text and turn it into a movie. It has often been noted that a disadvantage of film (versus written fiction) is its lack of interiority, its inability to depict thought directly. But movies have point-of-view, a subjective viewpoint on the action. And Aronofsky, who experimented boldy and successfully with a radically subjective viewpoint in , is able to use this to advantage in Requiem for a Dream. Of course, it helps if your characters are going mad.
In Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky lets us into his characters’ tortured minds even as they lose them. Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is an ageing Jewish woman, addicted to television and desperate for some glamour and some affirmation; her desire to be on a TV show makes her guzzle diet-pills until the very fridge seems to be growling at her. Her ambitious-but-useless son Harry (Jared Leto) and his friends Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) inhale or inject various drugs, and the film blurs or speeds or slows to give the viewer an impression of whatever trip they’re on.
Aronofsky has other innovative techniques, too. In , he used the repetition of a set of quick shots showing his protagonist’s pill-popping: pills in hand, pills thrown in mouth, and so on it takes longer to write than to see on screen. In Requiem for a Dream, we have the same idea extended to cover all the drug-taking, from Sara’s pills to Harry’s heroin: with, say, a fizz, a crackle, a close-up of bubbling substances and happy synapses, Aronofsky takes us into the repetitive nature of drug use, the loop of addiction that goes round and round; it is a kind of musical sample reused to create a beat, in the way today’s cut-and-paste electronica does, and it works stunningly. In fact, the film as a whole works stunningly that is to say, it leaves the viewer stunned. Blitzed. Blasted. The visual onslaught is as relentless as the process of degradation suffered by the characters. This is a simple story, a one-way trip to hell, but the way Aronofsky tells it is visually complex and startlingly original.
One criticism may be that the people get a bit lost in the welter. For instance, we never really understand why Harry should be so interested in drugs (if it is possible to understand), or get a sense of what feelings he may have about his mother, his dead father and so forth. He really only seems to come to life in one confrontation with Sara. Otherwise, he remains a bit of a cipher, as do Marion and Tyrone little more than empty people trying to fill themselves with fantasies of prosperity and artifical forms of well-being.
Sara is more fully fleshed, so to speak, more of a rounded character. This, I suspect, is down to a superb, deep, moving performance by Ellen Burstyn. She convinces entirely as a yenta yammering in Yiddish-inflected English, destroying herself as she reaches for her pathetic dream. She supplies a human centre, an emotional dimension that might otherwise have been absent from the film, obsessed as it is with its own pyrotechnics. The combination of that emotion and those pyrotechnics is devastating. You have been warned.