Requiem for a Dream(2000)

"In the end it's all nice" -Sara Goldfarb

Plot Synopsis

My plot synopsis for Requiem for a Dream:

          Four people living with four dreams. Harry and Tyrone who desire to get away from their dead-end lives decide to resell heroin as a means to make money. Marion (Harry’s girlfriend) dreams of starting a fashion line and opening her own clothing store. These three friends “waste time” by shooting and snorting heroin, taking speed, and smoking marijuana.   Sara is Harry’s mother, a woman living in a Brooklyn apartment where her TV is her only form of entertainment. Watching infomercials day after day, it is her aspiration to be seen on television. Her dream has seemingly come true one day when she receives a telephone call to be a contestant on a reality show. Wanting only to fit into her read dress to wear on television, Sara determines to lose weight. This obsession becomes so severe that she gets a drug prescription for amphetamine
After making a good sum of money from selling on the streets and believing that their lives were changing for the better, Harry, Tyrone, and Marion’s addictions take control. The homicide of a drug dealer that Tyrone was operating with leaves Tyrone stunned, covered in blood, and in jail. Bailing Tyrone out of jail and dipping into the heroin supply leaves Harry, Tyron, and Marion without money and without drugs.        In her pursuit to lose weight, Sara has become addicted to amphetamines. She now ignores her TV, is fixated on cleaning, and even has hallucinations involving her refrigerator. A visit from Harry confirms her addiction to uppers as she heartbreakingly expresses her loneliness and dream of being loved by others. Harry leaves her apartment in tears, shoots up in the cab, and stares lifelessly out the window.
Living without drugs is hard on Marion and Harry’s relationship. Harry believes if they just get a small sum of money they can buy some heroin to put them back in business. He convinces Marion that sleeping with her ex-physiatrist is they only way, and her need to shoot up overshadows her revulsion of the idea. Even with the money, another shooting at a drug deal leaves the three again without heroin. Harry and Tyrone make a decision to drive to Florida to meet another dealer, leaving Marion alone without her fix.   No longer able to eat or sleep, Sara’s mind starts to disintegrate. One vivid hallucination of herself as a guest on an infomercial and the refrigerator attacking her causes her to run from her apartment. Ending up at a television studio in her red dress, Sara unintelligibly rants about her call to be on TV, making the studio call the police who have her admitted.Harry and Tyrone find themselves out of gas a few hundred miles south of New York with a large, painfully infected black spot on Harry’s arm. The pain being too great, they drive to a hospital where they are arrested and sent to prison.
  Marion is going through a distressing withdrawal from heroin and is desperate to find some. She remembers a phone number of a man who will sell drugs, but only for sex. Again, her craving for drugs wins and she meets the man.
Locked in prison, Harry, cradling his arm, makes one last phone call to Marion, promising her he will be home soon. Tyrone is sent to hard labor as Harry, in excruciating pain, is sent to the hospital.      Stuck in a mental hospital, Sara still refuses to eat and rejects treatment. Unable to help, the doctors wheel her into a room next to a machine, hold her down, and perform electroshock therapy.
   Once again without of drugs, Marion returns to the man’s home. This time with many men around, she is forced into degrading herself and participating in group sex while money is being thrown into her face.
   Enduring racial slurs and hard labor, Tyrone is trapped in jail with no way out. A bloody saw cuts through Harry’s arm, as there is no way to save it.

The movie closes with each character curled in the fetal position. Marion, on her couch cuddling her earned drugs. Tyrone, alone in a prison cot. Harry, arm amputated in a hospital. And Sara, a shell of her former self in a mental hospital.

Scenes

Quotes

Reviews & Interviews

“Why are so many young, talented filmmakers drawn to drug movies, particularly heroin movies? At this point, heroin movies are almost their own genre. "

"Requiem for a Dream" is not about heroin or about drugs. In fact, I was never interested in making a movie about junkies -- I find junkies really boring and uninteresting. What was amazing to me about the novel, and what I tried to do in the movie, was the counterpoint of this Sara Goldfarb story, which completely deconstructed the movie as a drug movie. The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, "Oh, my God, what is a drug?"

Interview with director: Darren Aronofsky [4]

“What is fascinating about "Requiem for a Dream," the new film by Darren Aronofsky, is how well he portrays the mental states of his addicts. When they use, a window opens briefly into a world where everything is right. Then it slides shut, and life reduces itself to a search for the money and drugs to open it again. Nothing else is remotely as interesting.”

Review by Rodger Ebert at rogerebert.com
     

“What we’re really seeing when we watch Requiem for a Dream is an iteration of Hell on Earth—a series of images that transform into the thing they represent.”

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