I am a bad former film student. I say this because I spent four years earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film and Television Production from NYU, and yet I haven’t seen many of the films widely regarded as the best of the year… the best of the decade… the best of the century… the best ever made… EVER.

I started a Netflix account in 2006, hoping that a monthly fee and a queue of 130+ films would inspire me to catch up on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies, but I’m a bad Netflixer, and the movies tend to languish for 2-3 months on my coffee table before making it to the DVD player (if at all).

Last night Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream finally made it out of coffee table purgatory, and as I watched the acclaimed film, I am sorry to report that all my joy was leeched from my distraught eyeballs and into the gaping misery unfolding on the television screen.  It’s a great movie; the cinematography, editing, music, direction, and writing are all top-notch, and above all, the acting (especially Ellen Burstyn) is superb… but it’s also a real downer.

Requiem is the kind of movie that I’ll watch once and then again in a few years to show appreciation for the film’s technical and artistic mastery, but it will never be a part of my DVD collection, and unless I am forced to choose between American Idol and this movie, I’ll never watch it “for fun” on TV.

Requiem is not fun.  It is a heartbreaking portrait of four people (Harry, his girlfriend Marion, his friend Tyrone, and his mother Sara) as they succumb to the harrowing consequences of their drug (and life) addictions.  The ending montage that cuts between the characters at their most desperate, depraved, and vulnerable is particularly excruciating.  I was sympathetic for all of the characters, but I felt that Tyrone, Harry, and Marion were savvy enough to understand the ramifications of their life choices, and to borrow a truism, having dug their own graves, it was only fitting that they lie in them.

Sara, on the other hand, was a lonely, neglected widow who became addicted to diet pills largely through the indifference of a doctor who didn’t bother to caution against the side effects of the drugs or their addictive nature.  The doctor went so far as to prescribe more drugs when his “patient” became habituated to the initial prescription, even though she was clearly suffering from hallucinations.  Sara was a simple woman who had no idea what she was getting herself into, and Burstyn’s powerful performance deserved more than pity.  It deserved an Oscar.