- Title: USA: NEW FILM DRAMA "REQIUEM FOR A DREAM" STAGES ITS L.A. PREMIERE.
- Date: 12th October 2000
- Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 12, 2000) (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) MV: (SOUNDBITE) (English) ELLEN BURSTYN SAYING "I think by her not being able, or willing, I'm not sure which, to just feel how unhappy she is, and she keeps trying to escape that feeling and to me that's what addiction is all about. I was working on Mary Tyrone, in "Long Day's Journey Into N
- Embargoed: 27th October 2000 13:00
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- Location: LOS ANGELES, US & VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: USA
- Reuters ID: LVA9VMS9TXUO2RP3G1TI0USML0EH
- Story Text: New movie "Requiem for a Dream" is a gritty drama based on a 1978 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. that centers on a woman - played by Ellen Burstyn - obsessed with television and hooked on diet pills, while her son - Jared Leto - his girlfriend and best friend search for happiness while dealing with heroin addiction.
This is only director-screenwriter Darren Aronofsky's second feature, after ''Pi'' (1998), the low budget 'indie' novelty hit which was the critical darling of the festival circuit a few seasons ago.
"Requiem," a hit at Cannes, builds on that film with a visual style of hallucinations, nerve twitching spatial-zigzags, and stroboscopic montages of ritual drug use which include images of syringes, sighs, and dilated pupils - with shocking intensity.
A sinewy, pale-skinned Jared Leto plays Harry Goldfarb, a Brooklyn thrill seeker in his early twenties whose only ambition is to shoot up as often as possible.
Harry and his buddy Tyrone - the usually comedic actor Marlon Wayans- are two scruffy and anonymous users, looking only to laugh and shimmy to a hip hop groove as the heroin gets a grip.
The two hatch a plan to hustle dope on the street, all so they can purchase a stash of pure heroin, and the film takes us right on to their wavelength - an urban underworld of pleasure and deceit.
Wayans, the co-writer of the hit film "Scary Movie," and a member of the family whose name has become associated with a certain sort of low-brow humour, felt the need to rein in his slaptstick instincts.
"Normally I find jokes, I try to find jokes in everything.
"There's not a taboo situation, but Darren was like...
'no jokes, stick to the skip exactly the way it was . . .
don't try to shoot up the heroin funny, just shoot it,'" said Wayans.
Harry also has a girlfriend, Marion, played by Jennifer Connelly, a voluptuous beauty from a better family.
Marion, a pampered girl who wants to design clothes, gets hooked on smack as well, and the gradual transformation she undergoes, from caressing lover to selfish, clawing dope fiend and on to dead-hearted prostitute willing to do anything, is a slow descent into madness.
At crucial points, each of the three figures is viewed by a fixed camera as they scramble, against a jerky background, to escape some awful destiny.
The technique seems familiar, from music videos, but Aronofsky uses it to suggest that the characters, through drugs, are severed from their identities, to the point that they appear to be surveying their own self destruction as if they were figures in a live videogame.
''Requiem for a Dream'' tries to fully capture the way that drugs dislocate us from ourselves.
"Anybody who comes to see this movie can relate to it in some way," Leto told Reuters.
"They have a friend, or themselves, or a neighbour or whatever, someone that they know who is in this place and I really believe that it's a part of the human psyche that we have this desire to escape, and Darren's made a film that really examines the need and the compulsion we have to get outside of ourselves and to kind of just escape in a drastic way."
Star Ellen Burstyn makes no hesitations in her classification of Aronofsky.
"I think he's just a genius of a director and when I look at the film I just see his amazing use of the camera to tell his story and I'm so impressed with his artistry that I'm exhilarated," said Oscar-winner Burstyn.
It's that perception that powers the extraordinary tale of Harry's mother, Sara Goldfarb (Burstyn).
Eager to fit into her old red dress, the one her late husband once allegedly mooned over, Sara goes to a quack diet doctor, who gives her multicolored pills, and the tangled power surge of uppers and downers begins to interact with her hopes and desires, her fixation on the refrigerator, and her constant viewing of a rah rah TV infomercial guru.
The spiral of surreal paranoia becomes almost too much to bear. Yet Burstyn, in a fearless performance, never lets us forget how deeply Sara's addiction is rooted in the piercing cul de sac of her empty nest loneliness.
"I explored addiction a lot and I think all addictions are ways of not feeling our feelings and I think that's what's happened to Sara and the only hope she has is if she felt those feelings and then set out to change them, but by trying to escape them, she escapes into hell," said Burstyn.
The much honored Burstyn has been enjoying a renaissance of recognition this year.
In addition to "Requiem," she can also be seen in a new television sitcom, "That's Life," a new feature film, "The Yards," and the re-release of that classic tale of possession, "The Exorcist."
For Aronofsky, the indie route has landed him in the mainstream at last, having recently been tapped to direct the fifth ''Batman'' film.
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