![]() ![]() Leto and Wayans have a road trip together, heading for Florida, that is like a bleaker echo of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo's Florida odyssey in " Midnight Cowboy." Leto's suppurating arm, punished by too many needles, is like a motif for his life. Connolly, who is so much a sex symbol that she, too, could have disgraced herself in " Charlie's Angels," has consistently gone for risky projects and this may be her riskiest the movie is inspired by Hubert Selby, Jr.'s lacerating novel of the same name, and in her own way Connolly goes as faras Jennifer Jason Leigh did in " Last Exit to Brooklyn" (1989), an equally courageous, quite different, film based on another Selby novel. Later, in a virtuoso closing sequence, he cuts between all four major characters as they careen toward their final destinations.īurstyn isn't afraid to play Sara Goldfarb flat-out as a collapsing ruin (Aronofsky has mercy on her by giving her some fantasy scenes where she appears on TV and we see that she is actually still a great-looking woman). This is an effective way of showing them alone together. Early in the film, in a technique I haven't seen before, he uses a split screen in which the space on both sides is available to the other (Sara and Harry each have half the screen, but their movements enter into each other's halves). Aronofsky cuts between the mother, a prisoner of her apartment and diet pills, and the other three. ![]() The in-between times edge toward desperation. These sequences are done in fast-motion, to show how quickly the drugs take effect-and how disappointingly soon they fade. All done with acute exaggeration of sounds. Then the injection, swallowing or sniffing-because that blots out the world. First we see the pills, or the fix, filling the screen, because that's all the characters can think about. ![]() Here Aronofsky uses extreme closeups to show drugs acting on his characters. I've just finished a shot-by-shot analysis of Hitchcock's "The Birds" at the Virginia Film Festival he does the same thing, showing us some things and denying us others so that we are first plunged into a subjective state and then yanked back to objectivity with a splash of cold reality. Meanwhile, Harry talks to Marion about the one big score that would "get us back on track." Tyrone can see that Harry is losing it, but Marion, under Harry's spell, has sex with a shrink ( Sean Gullette, star of "Pi") and is eventually selling herself for stag party gang-gropes.Īronofsky is fascinated by the way in which the camera can be used to suggest how his characters see things. Her doctor isn't even paying attention when she complains dubiously about hallucinations (the refrigerator has started to threaten her). "The pills don't work so good anymore," she complains to the druggist, and then starts doubling up her usage. She obsesses about wearing her favorite red dress, and gets diet pills from the doctor to help her lose weight. She's addicted to a game show whose host ( Christopher McDonald) leads the audience in chanting "We got a winner!" She's a sweet, naive women who gets a junk phone call that misleads her into thinking she may be a potential guest on the show. She joins the other old ladies out front of their building, where they line up their lawn chairs in the sun. Tyrone suspects, correctly, that he's in trouble but Harry is in more. His pal Tyrone is played by Marlon Wayans, who has lost all the energy and cockiness of his comic persona and is simply trying to survive in a reasonable manner. Her son Harry ( Jared Leto) is gaunt and haunted so is his girlfriend Marion ( Jennifer Connelly). Sara Goldfarb ( Ellen Burstyn) is fat and blowzy in her sloppy house dresses if you've just seen her in the revived "Exorcist," her appearance will come as a shock. So is the mother: to television and sugar. The son's girlfriend and best friend are both addicted, too. This is a regular routine, we gather anything in his mother's house is a potential source of funds for drug money. Her son frees it, and wheels it down the street to a pawn shop. Now, with greater resources, Aronofsky brings a new urgency to the drug movie by trying to reproduce, through his subjective camera, how his characters feel, or want to feel, or fear to feel.Īs the movie opens, a housewife is chaining her television to the radiator. That movie, made on a tiny budget, was astonishing in the way it suggested its hero's shifting prism of reality. Aronofsky is the director who made the hallucinatory " Pi" (1998), about a paranoid genius who seems on the brink of discovering the key to-well, God, or the stock market, or whatever else his tormentors imagine. ![]()
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