“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.”  -Edith Wharton

How could so simple a concept as happiness be so complex? It’s universally known, yet so difficult to describe in words. There’s no shortage of ways that claim to deliver it, and yet it’s still so difficult to find. Do we obtain happiness through money, entertainment, fashion, friends, family, fitting in, sex, pharmaceuticals, narcotics, food, dieting, work, exercise, self-help gurus, all or none of the above?

But perhaps most importantly, what is happiness worth? Is it better to be happy in a delusional and ignorant lie or to despair in truth? Is happiness worth any sum of money? Is it worth suffering for? Dying for?

On its surface, Requiem for a Dream is the story of four people whose lives are gradually ruined by drug dependencies. In truth, there’s much more to it than that. Our leads in this film use various drugs and for different reasons, either to get rich quick, to feel good or to lose weight and feel beautiful. In short, drug use in this movie is a metaphor for instant happiness. The movie is thus founded on the principle that there are no shortcuts to satisfaction. Furthermore, the film also illustrates in vivid detail how true and lasting joy is in the journey and not in the destination.

Take Harry Goldfarb, for example. Jared Leto plays a lower-class kid who doesn’t seem to have or want a job. He’d much rather pawn off his mom’s TV over and over again, only for his mom to buy it back out of hock every time. But then, near the start of the film, Harry gets the brilliant idea of getting into the drug trade with his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans, believe it or not). Together, they figure that they can get some pure smack, cut it themselves and sell it for thousands. It goes great at first, but the drug trade proves to be surprisingly fickle (who’d have thought it?!). Our enterprising duo is cut off from their only source of income, leaving them desperate to find more money and new suppliers. What’s worse, Harry becomes addicted to the needle for his own health. They both pay for their financial and medical addiction to narcotics with their freedom and their well-being.

Then there’s Harry’s girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly). At first, Harry’s drug sales are simply a means to raise money so that Marion can design clothes, make them and open a store to sell them. Gradually, however, she becomes so dependent on narcotic emotional pick-me-ups that the drugs become an end in themselves. We see Marion trash everything she owns in search of something she can use to get high. Her increased coke use is marked by increasingly frantic reactions to Harry’s failures in securing a new supply. By the end, Marion has become a coke whore, submitting herself to endless humiliation and physical pain, just to get her next stash.

But none of these main characters represent the thesis as Harry’s mother does. Sara Goldfarb, played by Ellen Burstyn, is an old widow whose son has flown the coop, so she doesn’t have anything better to do than to sit and watch inspirational speakers on daytime TV. But then, out of the blue, she gets a phone call saying that she’s been selected to appear on TV at some point in the vague future and that details will be forthcoming in the mail. Is it a scam? Who knows and who cares? All that matters is that Sara needs to get back in shape so she can look her best when the day comes. Unfortunately, the stress of dieting proves to be too much, so Sara calls a doctor for a quicker and easier solution: Pills!

Sara doesn’t know it, but of course Harry sees it right away: The doctor is a quack who’s giving Sara a combination of amphetamines and sedatives. But Sara doesn’t care. She’s losing weight and she’s got the promise of going on national TV as the only thing she has to look forward to. But she doesn’t know what she’s doing. The drugs, plus her willful delusions, give Sara far more than she bargained for until her mind and body finally snap.

It’s important to note that these characters are not rich yuppies. They aren’t even struggling middle class. These people are living in the Bronx, broke and living in run-down apartments. By all appearances, they’ve got nowhere to go but up. To that end, it’s perfectly understandable how they’d resort to such desperate measures to find money and happiness. It’s also understandable that they can’t see how much they have until they lose it all.

The acting in this film is amazing. Leto may be playing a sad excuse for a human being, but his interactions with the other characters are so sincere and heartfelt that he made the character sympathetic nonetheless. Connelly took a while for me to get used to, mostly because I thought she looked slightly too mature and/or not quite grungy enough for the part. However, as the movie went on, Connelly’s appearance and mannerisms so perfectly matched her character’s downward slide that I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.

(Side note: I did have some slight problems with her scenes on the pier, unfortunately. On those few occasions when I watch a movie with a scene on the edge of a pier by an ocean against a bright blue sky, I invariably flash back to Dark City. That it was Jennifer Connelly herownself leaning against the pier’s end didn’t help.)

I was frankly quite surprised that a Wayans brother would be able to act with any degree of talent, but Marlon’s performance here is solid. Wayans plays an intensely dramatic role with perfectly reined-in energy, providing just enough to bring some vivacity to the movie, but not so much that he becomes annoying, comedic or overly stupid. But of course, the real star of this movie is Ellen Burstyn. Her character is cursed with a slow descent into becoming a shell of her former self and watching that transformation is electrifying astonishing. I don’t think it’s possible to watch Sara act as a subway crazy in the third act without thinking of the woman she once was and feeling some emotional pangs.

A big part of Sara’s descent into madness comes with a grand mal hallucination at the end of the second act. That scene was masterfully made, with acting, set design, camera work, sound editing and just a touch of special effects, all perfectly blended together for an experience that would traumatize anyone. It’s also a perfect example of “be careful what you wish for,” as all of the self-delusions that Sara broke herself to maintain came back to haunt her with a vengeance. Yet this is just one of many hallucinations in the film.

Aronofsky completely empties his bag of tricks to show what our characters are going through, and it’s staggering to watch. Different camera lenses, different camera placements, close-ups, time-lapse, repetition, it goes on and on. Of course, this doesn’t address the editing, which is a masterpiece in itself. The movie’s depiction of drug use is a good example, portraying the act of taking drugs as a two-second series of close-up quick cuts. More prominently, there’s the climax which takes all four of our storylines and beautifully collides them. The storylines comment on each other and build on one another in such a way that the editing makes the climax. Breathtaking.

Then there’s the sound design. Oh my god, the sound design. Some sounds are disproportionately loud, some dialogue is sped up or slowed down to incoherence and some scenes have no sound at all. It makes the film that much more immersive and does a lot to show us the gradually degrading conditions of our characters. The score is likewise superlative, prominently featuring what may well be the most ubiquitous string composition of the past twenty years. The score features several variations on that theme, in addition to another interesting, kinda “proto-techno” theme. Perhaps most intriguingly, the film’s score begins with an orchestra audibly tuning their instruments. This actually helped set the stage for the movie quite nicely and added to the emotional turbulence that we see in the film’s opening.

Requiem for a Dream is a rather depressing movie, but these characters suffer so that we may learn from their mistakes. The film is a beautiful meditation on the concept of happiness, masterfully crafted and anchored with superb performances from all the actors involved. In fact, the visuals, sounds, music and performances are such that I’d love to see this movie without any dialogue, just to see if it would still be every bit as powerful. I highly recommend this movie, just so long as you’re not expecting anything uplifting.