Movie #62 – Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 102 min, cert 18.
Four people from Coney Island have their own addictions. There’s Harry and his business partner Tyrone who inject heroin, Harry’s girlfriend Marion who snorts coke, and Harry’s aging mother Sara whose vices are TV and sugar. Thinking she’s going to be on TV, Sara wants to lose weight so she gets some diet pills from a doctor. These turn out to be a combination of uppers and downers and soon she is as much a drug addict as the others. The mood of the film gradually changes as the characters’ highs become shorter, and the periods between the highs become longer and more desperate and each character spirals towards their own doom.
Wow. When I first saw Trainspotting, I thought it was a pretty hard-hitting drugs movie which showed the consequences of drug-taking in a pretty harsh light. Well, Requiem for a Dream makes Trainspotting look like more fun than a trip to Disneyland by comparison. It starts off fairly slowly, introducing the four main players, and telling us the hopes and aspirations for the future. Then the drugs start to take hold, and all of that goes out the window. Trainspotting at least had a feelgood ending, where the lead character eventually gets clean and moves on with his life. You get none of that here. These guys are on a fast train to hell, and nobody’s getting off halfway.
I didn’t really notice the soundtrack during the first half of the movie, but as the film goes on, the score becomes more and more pervasive. Like the drugs, it takes over the scenes until it becomes constant and unremitting, but unlike the drugs, in a good way.
Score – I was originally only going to give this a 6 or 7, but the more I look back on it, the more I realize that it was actually better than I was giving it credit for, so 8/10.
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