Requiem for a Dream

Plots: Four Coney Island dreamers chase love, fame, and escape, but addiction and obsession begin to distort their hopes for a better life. Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is a retired widow, living in a small apartment. She spends most of her time watching TV, especially a particular self-help show. She has delusions of rising above her current dull existence by being a guest on that show. Her son, Harry (Jared Leto) is a junkie but along with his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) has visions of making it big by becoming a drug dealer. Harry’s girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) could be fashion designer or artist but is swept along in Harry’s drug-centric world. Meanwhile Sara has developed an addiction of her own. She desperately wants to lose weight and so goes on a crash course involving popping pills, pills which turn out to be very addictive and harmful to her mental state. Four character studies of the evolution into addiction and the manifestations of that addiction are presented, they all in the quest for acceptance on their own terms. Brooklynite friends Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love are aimless and somewhat shiftless, they making what little money by continually stealing and pawning Harry’s widowed Brighton Beach mother Sara Goldfarb’s aged television set, which she always buys back in not wanting to get her dear son in trouble in he being the only person in her life on who she can count. Seizing upon an opportunity, Harry and Tyrone decide to start dealing in heroin, Tyrone seeing the money as an escape from his ghetto life and a means for approval from his mother. Also along for their ride is Harry’s privileged girlfriend, Marion Silver, who rebels against that privilege in needing something other than money from her family. But she does see the money from the drug deals as a future for her and Harry in being able to launch her fashion design career. That dealing doesn’t work out quite the way they plan, while they start using just to make sure the product is all right. Meanwhile, Sara, whose best friend is arguably that television set in she watching it continually when she has it in her possession, learns that she *is* going to appear as a contestant on her favorite television game show, something she misconstrues. In wanting to reclaim her youth for the viewing public, her goal, in part, is to fit back into the red dress she wore at Harry’s graduation, which would require her to lose about fifty pounds. It is all in an effort to gain acceptance, including among her fellow Jewish housewife friends. Finding the dieting too arduous a process, she takes the advice of one of those friends to visit a weight loss doctor, he prescribing appetite suppressants which does result in that weight loss but a whole lot more on which she wasn’t bargaining in her naiveté and tunnel-vision on that singular goal.