Jan 03 2009
Requiem for a dream: Brutally honest and real
This movie disturbs you to the guts. The movie has brilliantly captured the helplessness, hallucinations, depression and the frustrations of the addicts. The best part of the movie is the portrayal of Sara Goldfarb. Sara is a lonely housewife who is an addict of the TV show and is obsessed with her dream of getting on the show. Later on, in an attempt to reduce weight she becomes addict to the pills. Eventually, she loses her sanity and ends up getting hospitalized.
This is what makes the movie so disturbing. It is not just about the addiction of the pills but also about the addiction to the artificial lifestyle we are getting used to. Most of us watch TV, play video games, are glued to our comps and try to find pleasure in the virtual world. It seems we are losing our life here. The scene where Harry comes to meet his mother and finds out that she has become an addict to pills is quite devastating. That scene haunts you for days to come. Harry desperately feels a need to talk to his mom and help her out and Sara is desperately in need of a human being who will listen to her agonies. But because of lack of communication, they are not able to express their love and pain to each other. This is a scene where you desperately feel that they talk to each other, because deep down in your heart, you know (and you know it from your own life) that saying ‘I love you’, is the only solution for most of the pain and problems in life.
I understand that this movie is about drugs and addiction. But more than that, this movie is also about relationships. Our world is becoming defined by machines. The obsession of chatting, checking e-mails every 5 minutes, creating a different world on the net and finding confidence in the faceless identity in the web world is as serious a problem as drug addiction. The unreal virtual world is killing our living world.
This movie makes you to think about your life. More than your addictions it is about relationships. You get identified with the characters so much that you feel their helplessness.
If your idea of watching a movie is fun then do not watch this movie. However, if you want to see how a sane person can go insane and gets in the vicious cycle of habits, then this movie is for you.
