Best of the Decade: 2000-2009

These lists are not easy to create. Something is always left out, or forgotten. No one will ever agree completely. But that’s the beauty of the list — it’s open for discussion or interpretation. After careful review of 10 years of movies, here is my list of favorite films from the last decade, the Oughts (2000-2009).

— Michael Clawson

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25. Primer
Two garage scientists accidentally invent time travel and they do what most of us would do: they play the stock market. But as the time loops grow more complex, the movie unfolds into one of the most difficult, but rewarding, science experiments of the cinema. Made on the fly and on the cheap by Shane Carruth, Primer is one of the gutsier sci-fi movies.

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24. High Fidelity
John Cusack … gotta love him. He plays the most manic, depressing version of himself in High Fidelity, a wonderful comedy about love, relationships and, because of its record-store setting, music. Cusack plays Rob, a recently single eccentric who reflects back on his many loves during a movie-long “top 5 list.” He’s joined by Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bruce Springsteen and the lovely Iben Hjejle in one of the most quotable movies of the decade.

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23. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
How do you make a movie about sex with no sex? The powerhouse that is Judd Apatow figured a way in this crude but lovable comedy that introduced us to the Apatow Comedy Machine and the genius of Steve Carell, who plays the title character with a pitch-perfect howl. Many other Apatow comedies would follow (Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Funny People), but The 40-Year-Old Virgin was the best and brightest.

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22. The Dark Knight
All of Christopher Nolan’s films could appear on this list (especially Memento or Insomnia), but Dark Knight is something very special. Yes, it broke most of the box-office records. And yes, it was Heath Ledger’s last film. But more than anything the Batman Begins sequel examined the roles of superheroes, especially their roles in relation to villains. Batman growled: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Dark Knight was not afraid to look into the recesses of a man’s soul for salvation or damnation, and for that it will always be remembered.

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21. The Hurt Locker
The lone representative from 2009 on this list, Hurt Locker was a juggernaut this summer. Compared to the abysmal Transformers 2, not many people saw Hurt Locker, but those that did knew it was something special. Directed by renowned action direction Kathryn Bigelow and starring a very talented Jeremy Renner, the film follows a three-member bomb disposal team as it navigates the violent streets of Iraq. Gripping and almost surreal, the film was the first of only several films to tell an honest story from our country’s new warzones.

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20. Japanese Story
One of the most thoughtful and unappreciated movies of the decade, Japanese Story might be also one of the most forgotten. About an Australian geologist (Toni Collette) who escorts a Japanese businessman on a tour of the Outback, Japanese Story cruises along at an easy-going pace until a dramatic twist changes the entire fabric of the delicate composition. The ending is heartbreaking and poignant, but it reveals the true nature of what we as a people are capable of becoming.

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19. Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson is an artist with his characters. In Punch-Drunk Love, which is something about pudding and frequent flyer miles, he gives us Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), an awkward and desperately lonely plumber salesman who has found love, or maybe love has found him. With Sandler’s best performance and a peculiar collection of new and old music, PTA crafts this wonderfully amusing and heartfelt tribute to the awkwardness in all of us.

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18. No Country for Old Men
The Coen Brothers are the most gifted of directors, and No Country For Old Men is one of their finest works. With basically no music, no fancy camera work, very little dialogue and a number of terrifically restrained performances, the Coens created their darkest, most haunting tale, this one about a bag of money and its suitors — a grizzled sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a hired killer (Javier Bardem) and welding rancher (Josh Brolin). And if you can decipher the dreams at the end and relate them to the film you’re a cinema expert.

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17. Juno
Most films bark at teens. Juno just wants to talk. The 2007 comedy, about a pregnant teen who decides to give her baby up for adoption, understood teens on a philosophical level. Juno also gave us a proper introduction to star Ellen Page, whose quirky dialogue was instantly quotable. Directed by Jason Reitman — whose new movie, Up In the Air, could have been on this list — Juno, and all its heartwarming goofiness, is a treasure.

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16. A History of Violence
Director David Cronenberg is no stranger to the violent and perverse, but here he outdoes himself … and in small-town America no less. Starring Viggo Mortensen as a diner owner, History invokes in us the outrage of violence and also the act of betrayal, which may be what Mortensen’s character has done to his family by hiding his dark past. In the end, though, the film, as disturbing as it is, wants what we all want — a safe place to raise our families.

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15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Striking and majestic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the first major martial arts movie of its kind (wuxia) to hit American soil. And now they’re quite common. The Ang Lee-directed picture centers on a mystical sword, its owner (Chow Yun-Fat) and a young girl (Zhang Ziyi) who wishes to wield its power. There’s lots of complex kung fu sequences, and also flying wire-fu, but the film is also an epic romance and a tragedy. Add into that stunning cinematography and a terrific Chinese score and Crouching Tiger is one of the most beautiful films of the decade.

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14. Lost in Translation
People who say nothing happens in Lost in Translation aren’t watching close enough. Life happens. About two disconnected souls (Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson) as they wander Tokyo’s culture-pulsing landscapes, Translation reflects on the loneliness of society and the way it alienates us from the mainstream’s centerline. It’s also a mesmerizing romance that ends at the most appropriate moment with a hushed whisper that’s never meant to be heard.

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13. Lord of the Rings
Peter Jackson pulled it off, and in spades no less. After filming for a full year on three consecutive movies, then releasing them a year apart — Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002 and Return of the King in 2003 — Jackson was not only able to create a convincing Middle Earth with Hobbits, dwarves, elves and a creepy Gollum, but he added real depth to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy books.

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12. The Departed

Martin Scorsese is one of the most gifted directors of any decade. But here, with The Departed, all his skills have been boiled into one red-hot crime thriller, about the Boston mob infiltrating the state police and the state police infiltrating the Boston mob. All the Scorsese staples are here — rock soundtrack, violence, Thelma Schoonmaker’s perfect editing, obscenely rich dialogue — as well as three of the most electric performances of the decade by Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo Dicaprio.

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11. Slumdog Millionaire
Hope is hard to convey convincingly on camera, but Danny Boyle never falters as he shows it in the face of young Jamal, a Mumbai teen who gets on a TV game show with all the right answers. Shot in some of the poorest locations on the planet and with many non-actors, Slumdog Millionaire nearly swept the Academy Awards the year it was released. More importantly, though, it showed audiences the importance of foreign film.

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10. Children of Men
Dystopian science fiction — from 1982’s Blade Runner all the way back to 1927’s Metropolis — is the oldest, and bleakest, variety of science fiction. Yet 2006’s Children of Men is something entirely new, and considerably bleaker. Set in a future London 18 years after women stopped giving birth, Alfonso Cuarón’s action-drama is ugly and cruel, but also beautiful and hopeful as it attempts to save the world’s last pregnant woman. The film is also a marvelous technical achievement as Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki craft exceptionally long takes around star Clive Owen as he plods through the nightmarish future.

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9. The Prestige

Christopher Nolan is no stranger to this list. All of his films examine the balance between good and evil, and also explore the duality of flawed men, from his existential Batman to Memento’s memory-suffering Leonard. In The Prestige, a deeply layered and fully realized dramatic thriller, he takes these themes to the absolute breaking point. About two dueling magicians, Prestige is also about obsession as Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman one-up each other in 19th Century London. The film, which is told mostly out of order, is made so exact that every single scene is essential to understanding the plot’s complex riddles.

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8. Kill Bill
Quentin Tarantino freely admits that he steals styles and filming methods from other filmmakers. Strangely, though, his films are entirely unique, even as they borrow from Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa and all his other favorite directors. In Kill Bill — both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 — Tarantino turns his manic attention once again to Uma Thurman, who plays The Bride (or B****** K****), a betrayed former assassin who is sent on a “roaring rampage of revenge” after she’s put in a coma on her wedding day. Most people like Vol. 1’s chop-socky and kung-fu swordplay to Vol. 2’s wordier, and grittier, resolution. I think of them as a singular unit and feel required to watch both as opposed to one or the other. Every film Tarantino has made is amazing, but his Kill Bill shows off all his skills and powers as a filmmaker.

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7. There Will Be Blood

Paul Thomas Anderson’s devastatingly raw There Will Be Blood was set at the turn of the last century, but its themes (greed, family, business) seem very appropriate in our world right now. Are not the CEOs of Citigroup, Enron, Goldman Sachs and Countrywide secretly versions of Daniel Day-Lewis’ devastating Daniel Plainview? Plainview, the vile oilman and father, abuses the public’s trust to attain money, and in the process abandons his son, his morals and all hope of his ultimate salvation. By the end of the movie, as he hollers to his butler, “I’m finished,” you can’t help but be thankful his reign is over. Or is it?

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6. Requiem For a Dream
Drug movies can be dark, and usually are, but not like Darren Arenofsky’s brutal, almost sadistic version of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel Requiem For a Dream. He casts Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans as addicts in one form or another as they move from score to score in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Told using a hypnotically frightening score, split-second edits of the drug peripherals and a number of clever camera tricks (bodycams, time lapse, cameras hooked to vibrating gantries), Requiem is the scariest of outcomes when it comes to addictions.

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5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Here’s a movie that’s almost science fiction, but instead veers into the psychological catacombs of a man’s despairing mind. Jim Carrey plays a man so depressed by a recent breakup with an extrovert played by Kate Winslet that he pays a company to erase his memories of her while he sleeps. Slowly, across the course of an evening, the process begins to yield results, but then the sleeping man changes his mind mid-dream. Michel Gondry’s surreal dream movie (from a script by Charlie Kaufman) is about the pain of love’s sting, but also about why that pain is a mandatory feeling — it proves why we loved to begin with.

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4. The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson is a genius. In 50 years he will be studied in film class, cable channels will run marathons of his works, and boxed sets of his films will be a mandatory purchase for movie buffs. His Royal Tenenbaums is his most complete quirky-dark comedy. Starring an all-star cast (Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Owen and Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston), Tenenbaums, about a dying father reuniting with his imploding family, has all of the Anderson trademarks: static displays of props, hilarious montages set to rock music, highly detailed set designs, his stationary camera setups and that classic Anderson dialogue full of non-humor humor.

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3. Once
I completely believed the romance in Once. Of course, though, the stars were actually dating when the film was being made, adding a real element to the story. Real-life singers Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová play small-time musicians who meet on a Dublin street and agree to make some music over the course of a weekend. Once is a musical and the music is heartbreaking and wonderful, especially “Falling Slowly.” But Once is also a fairy tale, so much so that it spilled over into the Oscar telecast, when Irglová was cut off from her Best Song acceptance speech and after a commercial break host Jon Stewart brought her back out so she could say this: “Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

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2. Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe directs his own life story in Almost Famous, about a teen who hits the road with a rock band in the 1970s as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. Everything works in the film: it works as a comedy, a road movie, a rock movie, a coming-of-age story, and in some ways it works as a documentary of rock itself with an awesome soundtrack to boot. More than anything, though, it’s a touching story told with wonderful zeal by Crowe, who captures the spirit of the ’70s with the exuberance of being young and apart of something important and magical. The film also gave us the electric Kate Hudson, although she’d never do another film as good or as important.

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1. Wall-E

No other movie from the last decade, or last several decades, has been as pure as Wall-E, a film constructed, down to every last nut and bolt, with goodness. No surprise here — Wall-E is a Pixar movie. The company has made a number of films that could have made this list, including Up, Monster’s Inc., Ratatouille, The Incredibles or Finding Nemo. But Wall-E is something very special. It’s about hope — hope that something better is out there for all of us, hope that change is possible, hope that love finds a way. The computer-animated film stars Wall-E, a little trash collector who blurts and bleats out his tinny electric language. It’s funny: he never actually says anything but we understand him more than we do most human film characters. His adventure takes him from a trash-filled Earth to the deep depths of space as he follows the only love he’s ever known. No film this decade has captivated the imagination, touched hearts, caused such great sadness, or been as moving as Wall-E.

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Honorable Mentions
The list isn’t big enough for everything, but I must commend these brilliant films: Korean revenge thriller Old Boy, M. Night Shyamalan’s realist superhero thriller Unbreakable, the Ray Liotta-starring cop drama Narc, the Robert McNamara documentary Fog of War, scary-real epic City of God, dark divorce comedy The Squid and the Whale, vampire romance Let the Right One In, gritty western The Proposition, Sam Mendes’ crime drama Road to Perdition, Clint Eastwood’s beautiful Million Dollar Baby and Brian De Palma’s erotic crime thriller Femme Fatale.

A special Jury Prize should go to Steven Spielberg, who has made some stellar movies from the last decade, none of which are quite good enough for this list, though all of them are close. His works in the Oughts: AI: Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, War of the Worlds, Munich and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for which I have forgiven him.

McNamara, icon of war, bares his soul

This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.

The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.

The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.

McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.

The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.

Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.

Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.

Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.

Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.

Once Upon a Time … When the Music Spoke

This is the fourth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

A great number of films strive for honest portrayals of love. Most of them fail and aim for lust instead — after all, sex requires far less talent and is so much more titillating. Here’s a film that presents us with two people brought together by a love so great there’s no room on the screen for it to manifest in the form of sex, or even an innocent kiss or warm embrace. Like Casablanca long before it, Once is about a man and a woman who, for reasons slightly beyond their control, can’t be together, but that doesn’t stop intimacy so profound that the film seems unprepared for the gravity of it.

Once is one of the more beautiful love stories of the cinema. It stars two people who were, at the time, falling in love themselves. They’re both musicians, which means their hearts are already tuned to love’s frequency. He is Glen Hansard, the singer and guitarist for the Irish band The Frames. She is Markéta Irglová, a Czech singer and frequent Frames collaborator. They essentially play themselves in John Carney’s musical fable set on a lovely Dublin street, where the only people we meet are musicians with unappreciated skills.

He is simply known as Guy in the credits, and she is Girl, although they are never identified as anything in the film. He is a street performer in a bustling plaza. He takes requests in the day, but at night he performs his own material, music that reveals the hurt, betrayed heart withering behind his battered guitar. She is a Czech immigrant selling flowers to tourists and she comes across his music at a vulnerable moment as he bleeds heartache during one particularly hurtful song. I love her entrance: the camera moves in slowly on his face as he sings the final lines of the song and as the camera pulls back there she is, as if materializing from a dream.

They become friends. He repairs her vacuum cleaner. She writes lyrics for a song he had long ago stopped tinkering with. She invites him to her apartment, where he finds out she has a daughter, an absent husband and three Czech neighbors who come over to watch football on her television set, the only one in the building. Abruptly and inexplicably, he decides to travel to London to get his girlfriend back and maybe get some kind of record contract. But before he goes, he wants to lay some tracks down in the studio now that he has a true collaborator and a backup band of other street performers. At times the film stops being a film altogether and nearly becomes a behind-the-scenes feature on a band documentary: there is lots of studio footage, candid music experimentation and playful moments on a beach during a break in recording. Even as the film wanders through these musical montages, though, the camera lingers on the budding romance between Guy and Girl.

Of course he loves her and he doesn’t want to leave. He respects her too much to force himself on her, even though that is a mistake he nearly makes in the film’s early moments. At one point he asks her if she loves her husband, to which she responds with several words in Czech. It’s a Lost in Translation moment and we’re not meant to know what she says, but the coy smile on her face suggests she might have answered, “No, because I love you.” The ending of the film is perfect, delicate and wonderful. A lesser filmmaker would have made it a tragedy, but Carney makes it a story of endlessly uplifting hope.

Once is a fairy tale. It’s also a musical. Music injects itself in every scene, and many of the plot developments are based on the actual recording or writing of the songs on the soundtrack. Consider a wonderful moment for Irglová: she’s in her apartment writing lyrics for Hansard’s song and her CD player runs out of batteries. She throws a jacket over her pajamas and walks down to the market for some double-As. On her return journey, in an unbroken camera shot on Dublin’s dark car-lined streets, she sings the song she just finished writing (“If You Want Me”). It’s a moving song that reveals the depth of her own pain and regret. In another scene, she sits at a piano and weeps as she ponders her own future in a mournful ballad (“The Hill”).

Once is filled with a number of poignant moments, but none quite like the singing of “Falling Slowly,” the song that won Hansard and Irglová an Academy Award. The scene takes place in a music store, where he teaches her how to perform a song he’s been working on. He runs through the verse, chorus and bridge, and she writes piano parts right there on the spot. After only several minutes they begin playing the song in a sequence too magical not to be a fairy tale. I love how the camera never leaves their faces; only once does it cut to a reaction shot of the store owner, who quietly nods his approval of the enchantment taking place behind him. To appreciate the scene more, we must leave the context of the film and visit the Oscar ceremony (see it here). After an emotional performance of the song live, Hansard and Irglová win an Oscar, but due to a misplaced musical cue only Hansard gets to make an acceptance speech. Later, after the commercial break, host Jon Stewart, in a classy move, stops the show and asks Irglová to come out to have her moment. Her belated speech should be considered part of the Once canon: “… Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

John Carney’s film is an uplifting picture made with considerable talent under what must have been difficult conditions using digital cameras in available light. Apparently it took like 17 days to shoot, which is as speedy as it gets. I object to the treatment of the DVD cover — where the movie poster is Photoshop’d so Hansard and Irglová are closer together and holding hands, and now wearing different clothes — but that’s hardly Carney’s fault. How he managed to get complex performances out of non-actors, musicians no less, is remarkable. And the statement he makes about love and hope is beautiful and pure.

I don't follow celebrity romances too much, but when I heard that Hansard and Irglová had broken up a year or so after their Oscar win, it hurt almost as much as the end of Once. It's our hope that the characters, and the actors playing them, can be happy forever. The film, though, provides the answer to that: love, no matter how fleeting, is an emotion that's always worth having, be it for 20 minutes or 20 years. Yes, Guy and Girl's love was short-lived, but once it's there it never leaves.

Requiem For a Nightmare

This is the third in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Addiction is a monster with an insatiable appetite, which is appropriate that Requiem For a Dream is more a horror film than anything else. This is not Trainspotting or Blow; there is no irony or humor in the destruction that drugs cause. Requiem bypasses all the winking drug culture acknowledgment and taps into the repulsion and the terror of addiction. It does it on the ground level with four people who have otherwise good souls with real hopes and dreams, real aspirations that float on the edge of the screen. And then addiction guts them from the inside out.

Requiem For a Dream is a horrifying film. Its dread can be almost unbearable. The first time I saw it the audience seemed relieved that it was over, as if its depictions were some form of emotional torture. Truly, though, it can be intense: the drilling music, the character’s pathetic conclusions, the unrelenting editing. It pounces on you and doesn’t let go. The effect is haunting and disturbing, yet provocative and strangely cathartic. It’s also deeply, deeply heartbreaking.

The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel of the same name, a novel that perversely exempts itself from basic grammar and punctuation. At the time of the film’s production, Aronofsky was a rogue independent filmmaker. He had done Pi on the fly without permits in New York City. After Requiem, in 2000, he would go on to do his long-delayed, nearly abstract science fiction film The Fountain and then his exploration of a deeply wounded has-been in The Wrestler, where his credibility to the masses was cemented in his careful direction of has-been Mickey Rourke. But Requiem For a Dream was his watershed moment in cinema. It defined his commitment to his material, specifically his characters, who he wasn’t afraid to bleed out within his plots.

Requiem’s four stars cover the gamut of addiction. First there’s Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The three of them, wander around Coney Island and Brighton Beach with no purpose. In time-lapsed montages we see them doing drugs: the fidgety boredom of marijuana, the wired energy of cocaine, and then heroine, their drug of choice, which makes them quiet and reflective as they stare at the ceiling and dream. They use the drugs to inspire them: Marion imagines owning a fashion boutique with her designs on the racks, and Tyrone and Harry want to buy some pure heroin so they can “off it” and settle into an early retirement.

The fourth character is Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother, who has to buy back her television set on a weekly basis after Harry sells it near the boardwalk for drug money. “When you gonna put an end to this and tell the police on Harry, Mrs. Goldfarb?” the profiteering recipient of the TV asks. She couldn’t turn in her only son, she says and then hauls her set back up to her apartment. Sara’s drug is her past, which she dwells on but can never gain back. Later, after a telemarketing hack convinces her she’s going to be on television, Sara starts taking diet pills so she can fit into a beloved red dress that signifies the happiness that was once so distinct in her now-indistinct life. Eventually, after only several days, the diet pills stop working and Sara begins popping them handfuls at a time. At this point in Requiem For a Dream, everyone is hooked on something and the downward spiral turns into a nosedive down into the void.

What happens next can only be described as a brutal, all-out assault on the senses, relentless and unflinching. Sara grows more paranoid as her uppers stopping sending her up, and her downers stop sending her down. Her sanity drifts in and out, and eventually she’s wandering the streets a drooling mess. Harry, now completely dependent on heroin, starts itching at an infection at his injection site on his arm. The wound screams at him for more drugs, yet each needle plunge assures his demise. Marion, unable to cop her fix on the street with money she doesn’t have, sells her body to Big Tim (Keith David), an upscale drug dealer who trades his product for sex or demeaning sexual performances. Tyrone gets off the luckiest with just jail time on a minor drug charge, although cleaning up in jail is no treat. The finale is meant to shock and offend — Sara getting electric shock therapy, Marion engaging a huge dildo at a sex party — because the effects of addiction are shocking and, yes, offensive.

I’ve given away some of the third act’s secrets, but the film can’t be described in text — it must be experienced. People talk about great editing in movies, like the famous baptism sequence in The Godfather, and those discussions should always include the entire last third of Requiem For a Dream, a virtuosic collection of sequences. By the time the third act begins, the film turns into a bleak, offensive opera of degradation: The jarring music, by electronic artist Clint Mansell and strings by the Kronos Quartet, becomes the wave the film rides on. The editing cuts relentlessly between our four characters. And the pace feels like an expression of panic or hyperventilation. Watch, too, how the three acts use color: summer uses warm golden hues, fall begins to incorporate more cold blues, and winter abandons all hope inside claustrophobic fluorescents.

The colors aren’t the only camera trick, either. Requiem utilizes a bunch of in-camera tricks, some of which were invented here and are now overused gimmicks in the industry. Aronofsky and his cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man) use time-lapse photography to show Sara cleaning her house, hanging and spinning cameras to show the falling dreams of Marion and Harry, and the famous “body-cam,” which is a camera attached to an actor’s body giving the impression of a purely subjective point of view. In one scene, the camera is attached to a vibrating motor that oscillates depending on the volume of the performance. In another scene, Sara’s grapefruit breakfast is eaten in still-life elegance with no hands in the frame. To illustrate the drug use, which is never shown in any broad detail, Aronofsky filmed dozens of close-ups: lighter sparks, heroin spoons, cotton swabs, needle pokes, veins loosening and pupils dilating. These quick shots — all added up to only a second or two of film — are strung together with appropriate sound effects to show the repetition and compulsiveness of drug use. Doing it this way, without drug paraphernalia laying in every shot, it allows us to watch the behavior of the characters and not the mechanics of the drugs.

Using all these tricks, Aronofsky has made addiction into a modern-day horror story, and he’s done it with the decade’s most underrated performances. Burstyn, in a fat suit for the first half of the picture, was nominated for an Oscar for her role (and famously lost to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), but the film didn’t get a single other Oscar nomination. No Leto, no Wayans and no Jennifer Connelly, who deserved a nomination and a win more than she did for her winning performance the next year in the completely forgettable A Beautiful Mind. These brave actors become these characters on such deep levels that their demise is painful, their hurt hurts us. By the time they curl up on their beds in those famous last images, the film has wounded us on a spiritual level — “What a waste,” we tell ourselves.

This is a frantic, ferocious movie and it cuts like a razor across the face of all that we hold dear, our dreams and our aspirations. Addiction is the very real monster that lurks out there waiting for us, and Requiem For a Dream is the monster’s exposé.

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