Requiem for a Dream
dir. Darren Aronofsky

Opens Fri Nov 3 at Neptune, others.

I WAS RECENTLY relieved to discover in myself a new immunity to the manipulative power of gratuitous spectacle. Relieved, because suddenly there were so many things I would not have to waste my time doing: I could happily turn down tickets to Cirque du Soleil; I would never again worry about missing a “great” music video; I felt no need to see more Brian DePalma films; and I could, with a clear conscience, blow off avant-garde Belgian dance companies. In short, I could spend more time drinking wine and watching people just doing what they do, knowing that the spectacle of a handsome man lighting his cigarette was fuller by far than what I was missing.

This pleasant immunity now extends itself to the work of hack auteur Darren Aronofsky, whose previous effort, the vastly overrated *, contained more useless, gratuitous spectacle than a recycling bin full of rave flyers. In his new film, Requiem for a Dream (based on the Hubert Selby Jr. novel of the same name, about the downward spiral of a trio of Brooklyn junkies), Aronofsky again opts to assault us with self-righteous imagery masquerading as some sort of daring bohemian technique. It is a conceit that manages to obliterate the few promising moments in the film: It looks like Ellen Burstyn’s performance is a knockout, but who can really tell, what with all the roving lights and lumbering refrigerators and cut, cut, cuts all over the place? Likewise, the rapid-fire montages that are meant to telescope the rush of shooting up instead play like a Nike commercial–Just do it!–promoting the thrills of junk. In the end, Requiem for a Dream comes off as so much high-school posturing: puerile, craven, and, in hindsight, embarrassingly tacky.

An interesting footnote to the production: There was a big stink made about the proposed NC-17 rating for Requiem (it is being released unrated). Ironically, the most gratuitous image in the film–a glimpsed (and faked) moment of forced pornography, meant to describe the nadir of Jennifer Connelly’s addiction–is the one that Jack Valenti and his team of zombies singled out to justify the restrictive NC-17 appellation. Of course Aronofsky argued for the scene’s essentialness. Would that he had substituted a shot of a handsome man, lighting his cigarette.