Requiem For A Dream (2000)

There are movies whose soundtrack is just as famous as the movie itself. Good examples are the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Psycho, or Jaws (Der weiße Hai). Clint Mansell’s Lux Aeterna is portentous, and scary, and at the same time incredibly catchy. Listening to it will likely make every single hair on your body stand on end and you might feel goosebumps even on your face. At least I did.

Once you have listened to it, chances are that it will linger somewhere in your memory for as long as you live because it is so very dark and poignant. It builds like a tidal wave and then crashes over you leaving you raw and shocked and vulnerable. It might make you cry your heart out. It is therefore likely that you won’t be able to stand listening to the whole piece. (here it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKLpJtvzlEI )

These things also hold true for the movie that Lux Aeterna was composed for: Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing masterpiece Requiem For A Dream.

The main character is Sara Goldfarb (played by Ellen Burstyn) who suffers from her life as a lonely widow in her mid-fifties. She spends her time sitting outside the house gossiping with a group of other women, and watching a tv show in which the protagonist constantly claims that not eating meat, sugar, or having orgasms, changed her life. Her son Harry (played by Jared Leto) is a drug addict. He has his own apartment but comes home now and then to steal Sara’s TV and take it to the pawnbroker so he can buy new drugs. His friend Tyrone (played by Marlon Wayans), who helps him with drug dealing, and his girlfriend Marion (played by Jennifer Connelly) are addicts, too.

All four protagonists pursue the famous American Dream in the sense of trying to become rich and/or change their current lives into something better. Sara owns a red dress which is way too small for her by now and which reminds her of the “good old times”. Her husband loved for her to wear it, and she also wore it when Harry graduated from high school. When one day she receives a phone call which announces she will be invited to participate in a game show, she starts to become obsessed with losing enough weight to fit into the red dress again. Harry wants to become a rich business man so he can help Marion open a fashion store for her designs. Marion hopes to escape from her psychologist and her parents’ authority. Tyrone, as a child, promised his mother he would not spend his whole life on the streets.

As the movie proceeds, the protagonists’ lives fall victim to their dreams and we are pulled into a tornado of psychoses and prostitution and misery. This movie comes close to a very realistic nightmare and leaves us shocked and numb. It is absolutely worth seeing – not just for the fantastic performances of each actor (esp. Ellen Burstyn) but also for its plot and music – but you might not want to watch it by yourself. 

Considering that Darren Aronofsky also directed The Wrestler and Black Swan, we can see that he obviously has a thing for the dark side in human beings. He tells the story of four people who destroy their lives because they desperately hang on to an unrealizable dream – or is it really the dream which destroys their lives? 

RATING: 4.5/5