dMYD DVD
Starring
Ellen Burstyn
M
Drugs are bad, mmmkay? And that’s
it, that’s all it has to say, the first big success of Darren Aronofsky’s
overblown career. Like the drugs it showcases the film has a big bad case of
style over substance, spending too little time concentrating on the lives of
it’s jacked up beautiful people to create any real empathy for them by the time
they’ve fallen down their mind tubes. There’s also cutting room issues here;
while it’s essential to show the isolation of an isolated character, the
near-complete absence of Ellen Burstyn’s tragic lock-in from the rest of cast
leads to a case of two films going on at once, neither of them with the depth
to make them the masterpiece they could have been.
But on the other hand, drugs are great. They
give a whole new shine to the world, they blast it into stained glass windows
and basslines, to colours you’ve never seen and speeds you’ve never reached.
They’re the only way to have a conversation with a seventeen-foot John Goodman
waxwork whilst ‘Hakuna Matata’ gives you a sensual massage, aside from having a
mental breakdown at a Disney-centric King Ralph convention in a health spa. As
a sensory experience the film still holds up as a whirling network of
fast-cuts, close ups and hallucinations, some dated, some still terrifying; the
piece builds to it’s nightmare climax by having the scene shifting get faster
and faster, more disorientating with regards to who’s doing what and why, what
they’re feeling, thinking and doing, what’s real and what’s imagined. As a
music video it’s great, as an engaging film it’s only a few steps away from one
of those awareness films they showed you at school where the accountant’s teeth
fell out and he ended up panhandling on the street next to his old office
building. Amidst all the smack whores and amputations and frisco freak outs
there’s a big hole where the heart of the film should have been; by centering
on style and horrific imagery Aronofsky’s done both drugs and people a
disservice, skirting round the excellent mind-trampolines they can be and
devaluing the lives they can destroy by treating them as drug mules to push his
art style. Worth watching for it’s slick audacity alone, but if you want some
real dirt look to Heath Ledger, in more ways than one. Or this.
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