Requiem for a Dream Review

Aronofsky and his editor Jay Rabinowitz use more than two thousand cuts where a film of this length would normally have six or seven hundred, and the repeated micro-montage of each fix, down to the dilating pupil, becomes the film's grammar: pleasure as a mechanical routine. Matthew Libatique adds split screens, a camera strapped to the actors and time-lapse, and Clint Mansell's score, played by the Kronos Quartet, went on to be used in so many trailers that it is now hard to hear fresh.

The young characters are mostly types, though Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans play the descent with conviction. Ellen Burstyn's Sara is something else. In fat suits and prosthetics she makes a lonely widow's hope of wearing her red dress on a game show so ordinary and so desperate that her story becomes the real tragedy, and her speech to her son about why the show matters is devastating. The final crosscut is punishing by design. The Washington Post called the film a one-note symphony of doom, and it is one note, played about as well as it can be. Artisan released it unrated after the NC-17 appeal failed.