“Requiem for a Dream” is the story of Harry Goldfarb, who is caught up in heroin addiction, along with his girlfriend Marion and best friend Tyrone. His mother, Sara, has nothing to do with his heroin problems, but becomes wrapped up in her own addiction to diet pills. Sara is a lonely widow who watches television almost nonstop. Her dream is to be invited on her favorite show, and it appears that it is going to come true. Her son Harry does not visit as often as she’d like, and her loneliness leads her to become obsessed with losing weight to wear the same dress she donned for Harry’s high school graduation for her television appearance.
Sara hears about a diet doctor from her friends and promptly pays him a visit. He asks few questions and subsequently prescribes a regimen of diet pills: uppers to help her lose the weight, downers to help her get to sleep. Initially, the pills give Sara a burst of energy, which she uses to clean her apartment and to focus on her goal of the red dress. However, she quickly finds that she is unable to sleep, and she winds up spending days at a time in front of the television.
Sara pays dearly for her use of diet pills. Soon, the uppers do not give her the high that she needs to get through the day, and she begins taking more than the prescribed dosage. She spends her days focused on getting high and losing weight and begins to construct delusions in her head of her imagined forthcoming television appearance and the stunning entrance she’ll make in the red dress.
Unsupervised, Sara loses more weight than she needs and soon can easily wear the dress. However, she loses her mind completely and winds up in the psych ward of the hospital where she is subjected to electric shock treatments. She no longer has any grasp on reality. I enjoyed this movie because it portrayed the horrors of drug use in a no-holds-barred fashion. Sara could have been anyone, seeking a quick fix to the problem of being overweight, and dealing with her loneliness by developing delusions of success and beauty. I especially enjoyed that the movie dealt with the subject matter in a graphic way and did not leave anything to the imagination. Sara Goldfarb could be anyone’s mother, daughter or friend.
