Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1740 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-08-14
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Amazon.com
Employing shock techniques and sound design in a relentless sensory assault, Requiem for a Dream is about nothing less than the systematic destruction of hope. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr., and adapted by Selby and director Darren Aronofsky, this is undoubtedly one of the most effective films ever made about the experience of drug addiction (both euphoric and nightmarish), and few would deny that Aronofsky, in following his breakthrough film Pi, has pushed the medium to a disturbing extreme, thrusting conventional narrative into a panic zone of traumatized psyches and bodies pushed to the furthest boundaries of chemical tolerance. It's too easy to call this a cautionary tale; it's a guided tour through hell, with Aronofsky as our bold and ruthless host.

The film focuses on a quartet of doomed souls, but it's Ellen Burstyn--in a raw and bravely triumphant performance--who most desperately embodies the downward spiral of drug abuse. As lonely widow Sara Goldfarb, she invests all of her dreams in an absurd self-help TV game show, jolting her bloodstream with diet pills and coffee while her son Harry (Jared Leto) shoots heroin with his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and slumming girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly). They're careening toward madness at varying speeds, and Aronofsky tracks this gloomy process by endlessly repeating the imagery of their deadly routines. Tormented by her dietary regime, Sara even imagines a carnivorous refrigerator in one of the film's most memorable scenes. And yet... does any of this have a point? Is Aronofsky telling us anything that any sane person doesn't already know? Requiem for a Dream is a noteworthy film, but watching it twice would qualify as masochistic behavior. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
Darren Aronofsky's new film stars Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb, a Brighton Beach widow who launches herself on a crash diet-a path that will lead to pill addiction and electroshock therapy. Meanwhile, her son Harry (Jared Leto) and his girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), yield to the pull of hard drugs. No one in this picture seems to have any powers of resistance; who would have thought denizens of Brighton Beach would give up without a fight? Each of the characters is fenced in by solitude; Aronofsky divides them by split-screen, and punches home their addiction with a blistering montage of pills, puffs, and widening eyes. All of this is managed with formidable skill, but it shuts the movie down, and the various junkies-even Burstyn, who gives the role everything she's got-end up looking less substantial than their respective poisons. A cautionary tale, maybe, but it gets a dangerous buzz from the aesthetics of a fix. The script was adapted from the novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., who appears as a ferrety prison guard. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
GREAT DVD AT A FRACTION OF THE COST. MATURE AUDIENCE ONLY. ELLEN BURSTYN IS FANTASTIC.

No subtitle options??
On of the most amazing films I've got in my collection and offers no subtitle options for any language at all, not even English?. How can this be?. Did they just forget that there are other people out in the world that do not speak English?. What a bummer. From having this DVD as one of my favorite options to share with my non English speaking friends, now I have it at somewhere in the middle of my DVD shelf. Out of the 100 points that I had given the film, just for the no subtitle options I take 30 away, so now is a 70 point movie for me. Such a shame.

One of the most overrated films of all time?
I give this film high marks for its editing and ability to hold true to its gut-wrenching focus from beginning to end. It's hard film to watch...but it also lacks much of a reason to.

The story, if you want to call it that, starts and finishes at the same point. There is no beginning, middle or end...it's just a sequence (though a terrifying one at that).

For a film to take itself as seriously as this one does, a viewer should...no wait, NEEDS to care about the characters. For me, at no point did I feel much sympathy or care about any of them, with the exception of maybe the mother.

Despite my frustrations with the script, it is well acted. It's gritty and certainly conveys the despair and dark underworld of addiction. But again, without any sort of arc, I never felt sucked into it and was really expecting some sort of payoff, which never occurred.

The editing is certainly unique and worth showing to film students. I've never seen a film like it from that standpoint.

If you can ignore the writing and just "go along for the ride", then its worth a watch. Personally, I was hoping for more.