Why Requiem for a Dream continues to be so divisive, 25 years after its launch

Darren Aronofsky’s radical drug-addiction drama was extremely acclaimed and angrily slated when it got here out in 2000. At present, this Hubert Selby Jr adaptation is not any much less contentious.

When Requiem for a Dream debuted 25 years in the past in Might 2000, it drew each rave opinions and a firestorm of controversy. The midnight screening on the Cannes Movie Competition culminated in a rapturous standing ovation from the auditorium’s 3,000 spectators. When the lights got here up on writer Hubert Selby Jr – who had written the 1978 novel on which the movie was primarily based – tears have been streaming down his face. Important admiration adopted, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw rhapsodising that director Darren Aronofsky had reached the legendary heights of Orson Welles in “vitality, consistency, and utter mastery of method”. 

The reception performed out very otherwise, nonetheless, on the Toronto Movie Competition, the place some viewers members vomited in disgust. Saddled with a restrictive NC-17 score, the movie went on to gross a lean $7.5m (£5.5m) on a $4.5m (£3.3m) price range, and was lambasted by some detractors for, as Jay Carr put it within the Boston Globe, “slumming in a imaginative and prescient of hell hatched from bourgeois consolation”.

What divided essential response was how Requiem for a Dream depicted drug addicts – which is to say, in up-close, harrowing element. The movie follows a widow, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), as she turns into hooked on weight loss supplements in an effort to grow to be a contestant on a tv recreation present. In the meantime, her son Harry (Jared Leto) and his finest good friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) hatch a scheme to get wealthy promoting heroin. When issues go south, they strain Harry’s girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) to commerce intercourse for medicine. The plot swirls like a whirlpool that pulls them towards their grotesque fates: torturous remedies of electroconvulsive shock remedy, amputation of a gangrenous arm, conscription into a jail work gang overseen by a racist guard, and exploitation in humiliating intercourse work.

The film-makers got down to ship a sensory bombardment that will mimic the expertise of dependancy. However they ended up doing far more, touching off critical debates concerning the free will of the addict, the road between compassionate commentary and exploitative voyeurism, and the poisonous siren name of the American Dream itself. Twenty-five years later, these debates are nonetheless smouldering.

The concept for the movie got here when producer Eric Watson observed a replica of Selby’s novel sitting on Aronofsky’s bookshelf in 1998. “Darren instructed me he’d needed to cease studying midway by – it was simply too darkish and unrelenting – and that intrigued me,” Watson tells the BBC. “I requested him if I may borrow it for one thing to learn on a ski journey with my mother and father. It fully ruined my vacation. I instructed Darren after I acquired again, ‘That is the one – we have to make this film’. So we optioned the novel for a thousand bucks, and fairly than anticipate Selby to seek out the screenplay that was misplaced in his attic, Darren wrote one himself.”

Aronofsky and Watson despatched the script to all the key studios. The response? “Crickets,” Watson remembers. “Nobody even bothered to name us again to show it down.” Undeterred, they secured half the funding they wanted from Artisan Leisure, and introduced aboard an impartial producer, Palmer West, to assist collect the remainder of a shoestring price range. The casting course of proved difficult, too. “Tobey Maguire, Adrien Brody, Joaquin Phoenix, Giovanni Ribisi – all of them explored the mission or confirmed as much as audition to be Harry, however turned down the half,” Watson remembers. “It was simply an excessive amount of of a profession threat.”

As soon as Leto, Connelly, Wayans and Burstyn have been forged, the actors strove for authenticity. Leto shed 25lb (11kg) and frolicked with homeless heroin addicts in New York’s East Village. Wayans roamed the freezing streets of Brooklyn’s Brighton Seaside shirtless in February. When taking pictures commenced, Burstyn simulated her character’s unhealthy weight reduction by donning a 40lb (18kg) fats go well with for her preliminary scenes, then swapping it out for a 20lb (9kg) go well with, and eventually taking two weeks off and shedding 10lb (4.5kg) on a strict cabbage soup weight-reduction plan.

Aronofsky, impressed by Spike Lee’s monitoring pictures from Do the Proper Factor, used SnorriCam pictures – cameras rigged to the physique of the actor – to convey a dissolving sense of exterior actuality. To this he added cut up screens, accelerations and decelerations, fades to white, title playing cards, digital camera spirals, fish-eye lenses, excessive longshots, pixelations, and surrealist mises-en-scène – all instruments for mimicking the sensory distortions induced by opioids. (Proof that these strategies had made an impression got here a couple of years later when The Simpsons featured an unmistakable homage.)

However whilst these visible results gained enthusiasm, the movie’s tackle drug dependancy stirred up controversy. Whereas Trainspotting (1996) had been pilloried for glorifying a cultural aesthetic of “heroin stylish”, Requiem for a Dream was seen as providing an unremittingly bleak portrait of substance use. The picture of a “spiral” turned the critics’ commonplace metaphor to explain its implication that addicts, as soon as hooked, are pulled virtually inexorably towards horrific ends.

“The way it depicts the trajectory of heroin dependancy is remarkably correct, I am unhappy to say,” says David J Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial Faculty London. “Most begin utilizing out of desperation or hopelessness, however a great quantity, like Harry and Tyrone, see the drug commerce as an entrepreneurial enterprise, as a technique to make a fast buck after which get on with their lives. Nevertheless it seldom ends nicely.”

In the meantime, Prof Nutt sees Sara Goldfarb as being emblematic of an entire technology of housewives within the Fifties and Sixties who “have been casually prescribed amphetamines with out applicable supervision from medical doctors”. As for Marion’s destiny, he says that in the present day “pimps proceed to regulate and abuse ladies by exploiting their addictions”.

However the core of what the movie will get proper, provides Prof Nutt, is that it dramatises dependancy as a chemical dysfunction within the mind that induces compulsive behaviour. “You do not resort to reusing extraordinarily painful injection websites until you are within the grip of irresistible urges,” he says.

Not all dependancy consultants agree. Gene Heyman, a senior lecturer within the division of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston Faculty, tells the BBC that Requiem for a Dream admirably depicts the euphoria of initiation into medicine adopted by worsening bouts of painful withdrawal. However that is the place its accuracy ends.

“This film tells a well-recognized story: as soon as an addict, at all times an addict, and it is essentially a downward trajectory from which nobody recovers,” Heyman says. “And that is simply plain false. All of the epidemiological knowledge present that by the age of 30, nearly all of heavy drug customers mature out of use – they cease utilizing and do not start once more – and so they do it with out remedy or skilled intervention. And that is simply the info, not my opinion. It is there for everyone to see.” 

For his half, Watson has grown exasperated with fielding questions concerning the accuracy of dependancy in Requiem for a Dream. “Hubert Selby was very lively in AA and NA [Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous], however our movie was by no means meant to double as a documentary or a road-to-recovery pamphlet,” he says. “No, it is not real looking. It is surreal. Relax.” 

Selby himself was at all times adamant that he noticed drug dependancy as only one manifestation of the seductive energy of the American Dream – and what he noticed as its poisonous results. Forward of the movie’s launch, he wrote a brand new foreword to his novel, which mentioned: “Clearly, I consider that to pursue the American Dream isn’t solely futile however self-destructive as a result of in the end it destroys every little thing and everybody concerned with it.”

Many critics have come to see Requiem for a Dream as being in the identical vein as The Nice Gatsby (1925) and Revolutionary Street (1961), works that expose the darkish underbelly of the American mythos. With its junk tv and junk meals, the movie is grounded in a particularly American milieu of addictions, says Kevin Hagopian, a Media research professor at Penn State College.

“The studio recreation present that entrances Sara is all about manufacturing an anxious, jacked-up, bogus pleasure,” he says. “Right here you might have an insane greedy after unrealistic panaceas, a shortcut to a fast repair so that you by no means have to consider your function in life. Right here, the American Dream is not the factor that wants pursued – it is the last word villain. And that critique is so devastating to the myths that prop us up that it is no marvel lots of people cannot abdomen it.”

Danny Leigh, now a movie critic on the Monetary Instances, lavished reward on Requiem for a Dream in Sight and Sound journal when it was first launched. “I used to be swept up in what was undeniably a trendy piece of film-making, with its uncooked cinematic brio,” Leigh tells the BBC. “Trainspotting had been a seismic cultural occasion, touching off a giddy Britpop second, and I noticed Requiem as a robust corrective, an virtually parodic cautionary story that stripped away the aura of cool and hit like a sledgehammer.”

Within the intervening years, nonetheless, Leigh has developed misgivings about Aronofsky’s physique of labor. “I’ve come to really feel there is a pressure of prurience to his film-making, as if he is prying into emotionally determined conditions and bringing an unsavoury condescension, even voyeurism, to tragic circumstances.” Leigh says this impulse reached its most grotesque extremity in Aronofsky’s The Whale (2022), wherein a reclusive and morbidly overweight English professor, performed by Brendan Fraser, eats his technique to loss of life. 

Hagopian, in contrast, feels that Aronofsky has proven a real curiosity to know folks shunted to the margins of society. “Many experimental movies create what I might name nightmares of psychic distance,” he says. “Consider David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), or Michael Haneke’s The Piano Trainer (2001), or Lynn Ramsay’s We Have to Speak about Kevin (2011) – in all these, we by no means study what the characters are actually pondering or feeling.” Requiem for a Dream, he says, takes the alternative strategy by attaining what he calls a “nightmare of psychic intimacy”.

“We’re simply compelled so rattling near the characters that sooner or later their ache and trauma appear to leach into our personal consciousness. It could actually really feel claustrophobic, even invasive. However to me, that is the bravest form of film-making, and it explains why this murals, whether or not you admire or detest it, is completely seared into folks’s psyches.”

Requiem for a Dream is obtainable to observe on Peacock, Prime Video and Apple TV+ within the US and Sky Retailer, Prime Video and Apple TV+ within the UK