Darren Aronofsky's second feature. A four-protagonist study of addiction across one summer in Coney Island. Ellen Burstyn's Oscar-nominated lead.
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, contemporary. The film tracks four protagonists whose drug habits progressively destroy them across approximately one year. Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) is a heroin user whose mother Sara (Ellen Burstyn) lives alone in a small apartment with their television. His girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) is also addicted. His best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) is a fourth user trying to build a drug-distribution business with Harry that will give them all financial security.
Sara, in parallel, becomes obsessed with appearing on a daytime television game show. She begins taking prescription diet pills to fit into her red dress; the pills produce psychotic effects she does not initially recognise as drug-induced. The film closes with all four protagonists in catastrophic situations: Harry in hospital with an amputated arm from infection, Tyrone in prison undergoing brutal forced labour, Marion in a degrading sexual situation she has been pushed into to obtain her supply, and Sara in a mental hospital receiving electroconvulsive therapy. The film's structural argument is that all four had been pursuing recognisably American fantasies of self-improvement; the drugs were the mechanism, not the motivation.
Requiem for a Dream's structural innovation is its four parallel tracking of four protagonists across the same year, with intercutting that progressively accelerates as the film approaches its conclusion. The technique allows the film to function as both a four-character study and as a single cumulative argument about addiction's structural similarity across different specific drug contexts. Sara's pharmaceutical-diet-pill addiction is treated with the same dramatic seriousness as Harry's heroin use; the film's argument is that the mechanism (chemical compulsion) and the underlying motivation (the gap between current life and aspirational self-image) is the same across the different substances.
The cumulative editing technique reaches its peak in the film's final 15 minutes — a montage that cuts between all four protagonists' catastrophic conclusions, set to Clint Mansell's 'Lux Aeterna' performed by the Kronos Quartet. The sequence runs roughly seven minutes. It is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-emotionally-overwhelming sequences in contemporary American cinema.
Ellen Burstyn was 67 during production. The role of Sara Goldfarb required her to play a woman whose progressive psychological collapse under amphetamine influence the film depicts in extraordinary detail. The performance is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-difficult lead performances given by any actor in the 2000s. Burstyn's specific physical and vocal register — the household routines progressively dismantling, the imagined television-appearance preparations, the slow descent into refrigerator-imagined-as-monster sequences — was committed without restraint.
Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress at the 2001 Oscars. She lost to Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich. The Academy decision has been widely considered one of the most-debated Best Actress results of the decade. The Roberts win was, by industry standards, the more-conventional choice; the Burstyn performance was the more-difficult one. The 25-year subsequent cultural standing of the two performances has decisively favoured Burstyn.
Clint Mansell's score for Requiem for a Dream is, by general consensus, one of the most-influential film scores of the past twenty-five years. The score's central piece — 'Lux Aeterna' — was performed by the Kronos Quartet and has subsequently been used in film trailers, television advertisements, and political-event soundtracks worldwide. The score has, in some sense, escaped the film; many people who have not seen Requiem for a Dream are familiar with the central musical motif because it has been used in so many other contexts.
The score's specific structural function in the film is to provide the cumulative emotional architecture that the film's four-track narrative could not establish through dialogue alone. The recurring motif builds across the runtime, accelerating in tempo and orchestration as the protagonists' situations deteriorate. The final fifteen-minute sequence depends on the score's previous establishment; without the accumulated emotional charge that the score has built, the climactic montage would not land at the level it does.