Nightmare on drugs

>> Ellen Burstyn ignites Requiem for a Dream

by MATTHEW HAYS

Ellen Burstyn rules Requiem for a Dream. The independent feature, the second from Sundance darling Darren Aronofsky, has Burstyn crawling the walls as a diet-pill addict who goes insane as her incessant pill-popping takes its toll.

The performance is yet another in her brilliant career, from Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore to The King of Marvin Gardens to the recently rereleased The Exorcist. In Requiem, she's a despe-rately lonely widow left alone in the world except for her son (Jared Leto), himself a heroin addict. He's in love with fellow addict Jennifer Connelly and along with the couple's buddy (played by Marlon Wayans), the three hope to reach financial stability by selling heroin.

Aronofsky employs a montage style that is utterly dizzying. He cuts from dilating pupils to needles being emptied into arms to gasps from relieved users--it's an effective editing strategy and the ante keeps getting upped as the quartet's circumstances grow more dire.

Aronofsky has based his screenplay on the novel by cult author Hubert Selby, Jr. Most famous for Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby's main themes are apparent here once more: this is a devastating piece, full of miserable, entirely unhappy characters anxiously searching for a happy ending that will never happen.

Aronofsky intentionally conflates all addiction, allowing virtually anyone to connect with his characters' misery. Heroin, TV, diet pills, chocolate, sugar--they're all depicted as a pathetic escape from our pathetic little lives. Burstyn's pills lead her to delusion and madness; Leto's arm festers with an infected sore from too many needles; Connelly sleeps with a slime bag to make a few bucks to support her heroin habit. Suffice it to say this movie will not inspire a Broadway musical starring Petula Clark.

Perhaps most poignant in Requiem is the recognition the lead characters have about the hell they're in. When Leto is visiting Burstyn, she begins to tell him, frantically, that she has won a contest and will soon appear on a TV show. He notices her teeth clacking together and recognizes the side effect: she's on something. He presses her about it, but Burstyn maintains that her new regimen of diet pills have allowed her to lose weight, noting also that she's lonely, in large part because he's never around. It's a striking moment, both for the sheer intimacy between the characters and the hopelessness of their predicament.

It's perhaps a tired premise, seeing as drug movies--especially heroin ones--have been done to death (forgive the pun) in the last decade. But Requiem works, in large part due to Burstyn's unquestionably brilliant turn as the woman drowning in uppers. It's her finest breakdown since The King of Marvin Gardens, and it alone makes Requiem worth venturing to.

Requiem for a Dream opens Friday, Nov. 3