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Requiem for a Dream (2000)
For an addict the drugs (any form of them, even alcohol or TV) are the answer. They make their miserable life bright and beautiful. After the effects go off, they need another dose to escape from the grim reality. There’s nothing more important in their lives than this downward spiral.
One of the addicts is Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), who’s got two “problems”: sugar and TV. She’s spending too much time watching a game show whose host (Christopher McDonald) leads his audience to chant “We got a winner!”. Sara gets a phone call that misleads her into thinking she might appear as a guest in the show. That’s when she realizes she’s not fit for TV like this and embarks into a weight loss program based on diet pills.
As she’s losing weight, something is happening to her brains too. Even if she’s having hallucinations, her doctor doesn’t pay attention to this. As she’s increasing the dose, so is she losing her mind.
Her son, Harry (Jared Leto) is suffering from a less “exotic” addiction, but more expensive too. He’s always taking his mom’s TV to the pawn-shop to get the money for his drugs, while she’s recovering it so that she can feed her own addiction. His girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) are also addicts, always looking for a big score that “will get us back on track”.
One recurring scene, the key to the movie, is used to show how the drugs take effect and how mechanical everything is for these addicts: one extreme closeup to the pills/fix, injection/swallowing/sniffing. The pupils dilate. The sounds are extremely strong and all happens in fast-motion, since drugs don’t need to much to take effect.
The movie is absolutely “painful” and amazingly depicts how desperate addicts are for a “shot” and how their lives get destroyed by this addiction that leaves no place for anything else. Some of the scenes and shocking, the entire movie is not something to enjoy seeing. It’s that kind of a movie you see once and wouldn’t see again. Not because it’s bad, but because it has left you speechless.
This is not a “feel-good” movie, there’s no fun in it. As there is no fun in being addicted. And, after seeing this movie, I really doubt anyone would enjoy a “joint” anymore. Even if it’s not suitable for adolescents, I’d surely show it to my kids if they ever thought about messing with any “substances”. If this is not a wake-up call, then nothing is.
Please watch the movie and be prepared to be amazed. It’s worth the effort.
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Addiction is such an incredibly powerful theme for a film. This movie was amazing the way it presents dream-like sequences that these addictions create and the way the real world comes back to crush them all.