Requiem for a Dream

Requiem for a Dream is a film about addiction and drugs which really attacks at the heart of the person watching it. We are presented with four characters, each with an addiction to something, and watch as this addiction eats away at their lives, tearing them apart and ultimately ruining them. It is an incredibly powerful, very disturbing film which will leave a lasting impression on anyone who watches it.

We are presented with Sara Goldfarb who lives alone and watches television all day. She gets a phone call one day telling her that she is going to be on television and immediately decides to prepare for this. She tries to lose weight and eventually starts taking diet pills. These pills have a horrifying effect on her and over the course of the film we slowly see her wasting away. Her aim is to fit into the red dress that her late husband loved so much, but by the end of the film the woman in the red dress is a long way away from the woman she fantasises she could be. Ellen Burstyn is absolutely brilliant, and manages the idiosyncrasies of a person who craves food perfectly. The story around her is perhaps the most disturbing of them all because it is the most relatable in many ways, and the changes that she undergoes are so dramatic that it makes you think about how easy it is to lose control. The pivotal scene where she is debating about taking more than her dose of diet pills had me willing her not to do it, just so that the horror she experiences wouldn’t get any worse.

Jared Leto (singer from 30 Seconds to Mars) plays Sara’s son Harry, who she believes to be a happy and successful businessman, but who is actually deeply involved with drugs. Together with his friend Tyrone and his girlfriend Marion they begin to spiral down into the cycle of addiction. This has horrifying consequences for all of them. They become more and more involved in their drug habits and start going to greater extremes in order to feed their addiction. Their respective fates are as bad as the fate which befalls Sara, and in one particular case, far worse, but I won’t spoil it for you. Both Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto do very well in this film, and it is sad to watch them spiral from the young couple in love to two people wondering where their next hit is going to come from.

At the end of the film, the last scene is horrendous. Shortly before, we are presented with each characters outcomes (including one of the most disturbing scenes I have ever watched) and despite being a very minimalist ending, the weight of the last hour and a half of their actions makes this scene very poignant. The characters curl into the foetal position, and you find yourself looking back to the start of the film and realising how dramatically wrong their lives have gone in such a short space of time. The film is very difficult to write about because it is quite hard to convey just how much of an impact it leaves on you. It is not a pleasant film at all, and in many places it is very disturbing, but what is worse is that the audience can see it happening. Obviously you can’t predict what will happen to the characters, but the audience is sitting there knowing that it is not going to end well. It has a very powerful message about addictions in this sense. It is also very difficult to watch, and not only because of the outcomes for each of the characters. The way it is filmed doesn't make for easy watching, and every instance of drug taking is marked by a montage of the effects it has on the body.

The director, Darren Aronofsky (who also did Black Swan), has done a fantastic job with this film. In no sense of the word is Requiem for a Dream entertaining, and you will find yourself genuinely disgusted at times throughout the film, but it is the message that is most important. It highlights the devastating effects that drugs and addiction can have on your life, and by making you engage with the characters, it makes you ‘feel’ when it all goes wrong. It is very rare that a film has such a significant impact on you after you watch it, but Requiem for a Dream does. It is one of those films that I immediately recommended to a friend, just because of the impact it had on me.

A little tip of the hat to the soundtrack, which includes the song ‘Requiem’ which you will know when you hear. The use of this song in the film adds to the impact it has, making a very imposing and scary situation much worse.

I cannot recommend Requiem for a Dream strongly enough, but not because of its entertainment value. It will leave you thinking for quite a while after, and you will likely not enjoy some of the scenes, but it is one of those films that you cannot afford to miss. It is an incredibly powerful film about addiction and is so real that it makes you feel like you have been dragged in as well.

A Beautiful Mind

Now regular readers will know that I am not Russell Crowe’s biggest fan. If I’m honest I can’t stand the guy. In the vast majority of roles that I've seen him in he is wooden and bland, and I don’t like him as a person. However, A Beautiful Mind is the exception to this. This is the Academy Award winning film about the life of John Nash and his struggle with schizophrenia.

John Nash starts off as a student of mathematics at Princeton and immediately the audience sees that he is a very dedicated and hard-working individual. He is striving immensely hard for an ‘original idea’ in order to revolutionise his field. His room-mate is his polar opposite, but they get along very well despite him not getting on well with other people. During his teaching of a class at Princeton he meets a student in the typical manner – she is the one who challenges the teacher. After he finishes at Princeton he becomes a codebreaker and is subsequently sought by the secret services to break a Russian code about a bomb that is planning to be dropped on America. He has since married Alicia, the student in his class, and they have a son. However all is not what it seems, and she begins to get suspicious of his behaviour, calling in a psychiatrist to help him. He is subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia and we wee how his life is dramatically affected by this. His room-mate at Princeton, his room-mate’s niece and the secret services agent are all revealed to be hallucinations, and Nash’s life begins to fall apart. After an incredibly long struggle with his illness Nash is awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to modern business and economics, and this is a heartwarming conclusion as he dedicates his achievement to his wife who is ‘his reason’.

Now, much as it pains me to say this, Russell Crowe is absolutely incredible in A Beautiful Mind. A few posts back I compared Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Robert de Niro in Awakenings. Well now Russell Crowe can be added to that list. He is spectacular at getting the little parts of the character right. His gait and the manner in which he walks so consistently throughout the film is brilliant, and his speech and accent, which I have criticised Crowe for before, is almost nailed on throughout the movie. Despite being a thoroughly unlikable character, the audience immediately takes to John Nash as the underdog of life, and Russell Crowe brings a strong sense of engagement and emotion to the role. The emotions that Nash experiences when he is first committed is conveyed beautifully by Crowe, and even better is his emotion at the end. I watched  A Beautiful Mind recently with my Mum and she was saying how tragically sad it is at the end, and I agree. I can only praise Russell Crowe for his acting in this film, and am genuinely surprised that he missed out on the Academy Award for Best Actor. Having said that, I haven’t seen Training Day, so I can’t possibly comment.

Jennifer Connelly plays John’s wife, Alicia Nash, and she does a very good job. By no means can it be easy to play the wife of a schizophrenic man, and Connelly does fantastically well to convey the emotion, frustration and difficulty that this illness brings to the lives of everyone affected by it. Now the film embellishes the finer details of John and Alicia’s marriage a bit. In reality they divorce during the stages of John’s illness, but John lived in her house after his was discharged. They re-married in 2001, but the film doesn't mention any of this. I think that whether or they were married doesn't matter though. To me, them not being married is incidental as she still devotes a substantial amount of her time to taking care of him. I wouldn't have tipped her for an Academy Award based on A Beautiful Mind, but I am not going to begrudge her it. She puts in a very good performance in a very tricky role.

The other supporting actors are fairly incidental, and like the other films with actors that steal the show, Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer and Paul Bettany sort of fade into the background. Their roles in the film aren't especially exceptional, and while none of them put in a staggeringly bad performance, they are massively overshadowed by the fantastic character that Russell Crowe creates. I cannot think of a single aspect of his character that I don’t like. From his dedication to his work, through his dismay at losing, his joking about hallucinations, his determination to ignore the hallucinations and his mannerisms when he reaches old age and is accepted and lauded by everyone I find his character so charmingly lovable that I am always rooting for him. It might be my background in psychology or the fact that this type of film is my absolute favourite, but I really like the character.

John Nash is undoubtedly a genius, and undoubtedly not enough people are aware of his influence. A Beautiful Mind is the opportunity to find out about someone you might not have heard about. If you have heard about him then it is an emotional and enjoyable journey through the struggles of a man whose difficulties many of us cannot begin to comprehend. I rate this film so highly, and consider it to be one of the best winners of the Best Picture award. There is no-one that I wouldn’t recommend it to, and would encourage everyone to watch it. I myself watched it again yesterday, and already I want to see it again.