makeshiftmind

There is no other movie more aptly titled than Requiem for a Dream.  The whole movie is, in fact, just that.  The movie revolves around four characters – the elderly Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion, and his best friend Tyrone.  Each character has dreams of becoming more than they are.

Sara is old and lonely; her husband is dead, and her son rarely visits.  When he does, he usually procures his mother’s household items to pawn for drug money.  Sara loves him to a fault, and refuses to turn him in to the police, but routinely visits the street corner pawn shop to buy her things back after his “visits”.  Sara receives a phone call early in the film, informing her that she has been “pre-selected” to be a featured guest on her favorite self-help television show, if she fills out an application that will be mailed to her.  She quickly spreads the word throughout her apartment building and becomes the center of attention as her friends all fawn over her opportunity to be famous.  Conscious of her age and weight, Sara confides in a friend who colors her hair and loans her a book about dieting.  The diet is strenuous and Sarah has trouble keeping pace, so she seeks out a doctor who prescribes pills that will help her lose weight.  The pills give her an enormous buzz, lots of energy, and eventually she begins shedding the pounds.  Her dream of being on television is within reach.

It’s easy to dislike Harry for taking advantage of his mother, but on occasional tender moments, he reveals a soft side – it is never his intent to hurt her, and he wants her to be happy.  Harry and Tyrone have been raised on the streets, but Marion is from a privileged yet distant family.  Together they agree to traffic drugs to raise money and elevate their lifestyle.  Marion is a gifted clothing designer, and Harry encourages her to pursue her dream.  Tyrone is good natured, often reminiscing about his life as a child when he promised his mother, living in poverty, that he would make something of himself.  They want their dreams to take them beyond the present, gritty reality they all deal with every day, and drug dealing is their golden ticket.  Moderate success brings quick cash, and things are going smoothly.  Harry and Marion purchase a small shop for her to begin showing her designs.  They party together, pull pranks together, walk on the beach together, and make love together. Tyrone also, in a brief scene, has an intimate moment with a girl that is implied to be his romantic interest (she is absent in the rest of the film).

As the movie continues, Sara becomes more and more obsessed with her television appearance.  She joins the other elderly ladies in their daily sunning ritual by propping her lawn chair on the sidewalk next to the rest of them, in a spot that places her at the center of attention.  When the mailman walks by, she rushes to meet him every day waiting for her application to be on television.  When it does arrive, the ladies rush up to her apartment to fill it out and deliver it ceremoniously to the blue post office box on the corner of the sidewalk.

As Sara’s excitement grows, so does the energy she receives from her daily medication.  She can’t sleep at night and has to take special pills to reverse the nervous anxiety generated by her dietary medication.  She goes on cleaning sprees through her apartment and removes all the food from the fridge lest she be tempted to eat.  The self-help television show she watches religiously exhorts her to take control; all the while a constant, anxious paranoia builds inside her head.  She begins to hallucinate occasionally, imagining that her refrigerator is growling at her for leaving it empty.  She attributes her ailments to her medication, but her doctor continues prescribing it and telling her she only needs time to “adjust”.

Things are still going well for Harry, and he decides to pay his mother back for pawning her possessions when he was tight for money.  He purchases her a large, brand new television and takes a trip to her apartment to deliver the news in person.  Sara is delighted to see him, but her nervous energy flags Harry’s awareness.  He presses her about her weight loss when he hears her grinding her teeth at the kitchen table.  For the first time in the film, Harry sees the lie for what it is – his mother is becoming addicted to drugs to secure her own happiness.  Harry’s cognitive dissonance is apparent, and he forcefully warns her to stop taking her medication (which he identifies as a variant of Speed), but she responds with a small monologue which, I can only describe as being so painfully sad, and so painfully true at the same time.  She tells him that the promise of her appearance on television has given her a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to care about how she looks.  She even dusted off her fancy red dress that she wore to Harry’s graduation, and only needs to lose twenty-five more pounds to fit in it.  She likes the way she feels, and she is the center of attention among her friends, which is so important to her because she is so utterly lonely.  Harry promises that he will come and visit more often, and bring Marion so Sara can meet her.  Then he awkwardly leaves with a short good-bye.

Months pass, and Harry, Marion and Tyrone continue using and selling drugs.  The supply on the street quickly dries up when the mob executes a hit on a gang encroaching on its territory.  Tyrone gets caught in the middle of the hit, and manages to escape with his life, but is arrested and placed in prison.  Harry uses a significant portion of their drug money to pay for Tyrone’s bail.  Once their supply is used up, Harry and Marion begin going into withdrawal.  Pale skin, sunken eyes, and constant perspiration form a pale visage of their once youthful forms.  Harry has an infected vein on his arm where he shoots up, but he ignores it hoping it will go away.  When they become desperate for a fix, Harry encourages Marion to accept the advances of an older man in exchange for money so they can buy more drugs.  The eyes in his darkened sockets reveal two horrible things: that he knows his request is horribly twisted and wrong, and yet his addiction has taken ownership of his soul and he will do anything – even sacrifice his love – to feed it.  Marion’s need is just as strong, and though she abhors the idea, the need compels her and she accepts Harry’s proposal.

After Marion returns with the money, Harry and Tyrone go to a meet for a local drug dealer who has agreed to release more drugs onto the street.  When the crowd gets unruly and shots are exchanged,  the drug dealer pulls out and Harry and Tyrone are left with no drugs.  They agree to travel to Florida where the drug dealer is based in order to bring drugs back home, but when they return to Harry’s apartment empty handed, Marion goes into hysterics because she endured the degradation of selling her body and could not get her fix in return.  In anger, Harry writes down the phone number of a local john who is known to exchange drugs for sexual favors.  Harry thrusts it into Marion’s hands and leaves the house to go to Florida with Tyrone.

Sara’s paranoia and delusions have reached extreme levels, meanwhile.  She spends hours in front of the television watching her self-help program, daydreaming about her eventual appearance on center stage.  She takes more and more diet pills because of her increasing agitation, and begins to hallucinate that her refrigerator is sliding across the kitchen floor, coming to devour her.  The television personas begin to come out of the TV and move around her home, mocking her impoverished lifestyle and laughing at her homely appearance.  Every insecurity that Sara has becomes a psychotic nightmare relentlessly grinding away at her consciousness.  In a final maddening break, she flees her apartment and boards a bus to the television station, telling everyone along the way how she will be on TV with her son and her dead husband.  When she reaches the studio she is in hysterics; she doesn’t understand why they haven’t called her.  Soon police arrive and take Sara to the hospital, where a doctor drugs her further and she is force fed by careless orderlies.  When the treatments don’t work, the doctor concludes that experimental electro-shock treatment is necessary.  Sara is strapped to a table and the procedure is conducted.

While on the road to Florida, Harry begins going into withdrawal and decides to shoot up in the car.  Tyrone sees Harry’s horribly infected arm, and insists they visit a hospital.  When they arrive the doctor calls the police.  Harry manages to make one call to Marion, who is preparing to leave for a special “party” the john is throwing where she will be the center of attention in order to pay for more drugs.  She begs Harry to come home, and he promises that he will, but through the tears and the agony, their faces both reveal what they both know: he won’t be coming home.

Harry and Tyrone are thrown in prison overnight, where Harry agonizes over the pain in his arm, and Tyrone continues to yell for someone to help.  In the morning, a doctor arrives and after Tyrone endures racial insults and the abusive guard accompanying the doctor, Harry is taken to the emergency room where his arm is amputated, and the doctor comments that he doesn’t expect Harry to survive the night.  When Harry awakes from his surgery, the nurse hears him repeating Marion’s name, and she tries to encourage him by telling him that whoever Marion is, she will be notified so she can come be with him.  He begins sobbing and finally manages to say, “No, she won’t.”

Tyrone is taken to prison to work on a chain gang.  The last time he is seen, he is sleeping on his prison cot, plagued by a nightmare in which he is a little child telling his mother that when he is older, he will make something of himself.

Sarah is committed to a mental institution, and when her friends from the apartment building come to visit, they are shocked to find Sara a hollow shell of a human being.  After their visit they sit outside on a bench and cry together for their friend.

Marion attends the john’s party, where she is put on display for the gratification of high paying bidders, mostly disgusting older men.  The humility is overbearing; the price is so high, the payoff so little.  But when Marion returns home, she lays on her couch clutching her drugs as if they were life itself.

At the beginning of the film, even though the characters are all flawed and I have a certain disdain for the seedy underbelly of life that they participate in, I can still see and identify with the flecks of beauty beneath the stained exterior at this point.  The appeal to empathy is subtle, but effective.  I am emotionally invested at this point – not extensively, but sufficiently.  And this is an important distinction, because the rest of the movie is one horrible, damnable betrayal of that limited investment.  All the characters began with dreams.  They wanted to be happy and fulfilled. But the means that they chose to pursue those dreams became the very things that consumed them and destroyed their happiness, hopes, and ultimately, their humanity.

Sara daydreams of her appearance in front of a live audience, where she can smile and everyone likes her – she wants to tell them about her husband, and her son of whom she is so proud.  Before Harry starts dealing drugs, he has a waking dream where he is running along a long pier.  He can see Marion at the end and as he nears her, she turns and smiles warmly at him.  As the film closes, Sara’s dream has changed, and her son comes to stand with her center stage, and as he hugs her he says “I love you ma”.  She realizes that the fame and accolades are not the real meaningful things, and that it is too late for her to ever have the thing she wants the most: Harry’s love.  In the final moments on his hospital bed, Harry also relives his vision – he runs towards Marion but as he nears the end of the pier, she disappears and there is nothing.  He starts to back up in astonishment, the pier disappears, and he falls into a dark abyss.  His only love has been taken from him, and only he is to blame.

I don’t like Requiem – not because the movie had flaws, but because it’s not a movie to be liked.  The acting is superb, the music haunting, the cinematography surreal.  Requiem is a movie about finality – the finality of mistakes that we deny we’re making.  It is about last chances squandered.  The film ends, literally, at the point of no return, where all tragedies must necessarily end.  It is one of the most artful portrayals of self-destruction that I have ever seen.  And I don’t think I will ever watch it again.