Under the Spotlight: Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb and her all-consuming quest for validation
Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is regularly a tough watch and a powerful rumination on the spoken and unspoken perils of addiction. Heroin may not be her drug of choice, but Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb nonetheless ends up becoming consumed by her desire to be validated and accepted.
Even though Jared Leto’s son Harry keeps stealing from her and using the ill-gotten gains to fund his habit, she continues to defend him at every turn. As her only child, the light of her life, and the apple of her eye, it’s clear in the way she’s presented that her need to be validated by anyone around her has been ongoing for some time, even if a drug-addicted child isn’t exactly one for reciprocation.
Because of that, Sara spends the majority of her time alone watching television, which instigates her own downward spiral, one that runs parallel to her boys’. It begins innocuously enough, with Burstyn aching with resignation as she wolfs down chocolates to get her own version of a fix, while the TV remote constantly clutched in her hand is indicative of the other.
It’s a life not unlike that lived by many, but the spiral really begins when she gets a phone call offering her the opportunity to take part in her favourite TV show. It’s at that moment Requiem with a Dream shows her smiling for the first time, but it’s far from a happy moment. Sara longingly gazes at a photo of Harry’s high school graduation, where he posed proudly alongside his mother and late father, further underlining the longing she has to be embraced and endorsed by a family that no longer exists in its idealised form.
Attempting to squeeze into the same red dress she wore that day turns out to be the first wobbly step down a very slippery slope, shattering her moment of bliss in an instant. Crash-dieting in an effort to look her best under the bright lights of a television studio, Sara forces herself to eat the things she doesn’t want to because the end goal is giving her something she’s always dreamed of.
It’s not an easy juxtaposition to play, but no matter how disgruntled Sara appears with her newfound regimen, Burstyn always projects a sense of inner determination that’s only being held together by the thinnest of threads. Should that thread snap for whatever reason, though, there’s every chance she’s heading nowhere but straight off the deep end.
Seeking solace in the show fronted by Christopher McDonald’s Tappy Tibbons, Sara’s reliance on diet pills causes her to slip into a waking hallucination. She might be sitting down and watching TV, but Aronofsky’s increasingly frantic camerawork and overpowering closeups dovetail with the fiction overcoming the fact, eventually leaving her a quivering wreck when she’s betrayed by her very own fantasy and left at the mercy of an addiction that would never have started in the first place were it not for one fateful phone call.
The mask slips further and further, with Burstyn effortlessly navigating the ups and downs that come with Sara’s decreasing ability to live her life without the pills that do the very same thing. Even Harry notices that something is up with his mother, a telling assessment given his own situation. Still, because she’s convinced that “millions of people will see me and they’ll all like me” when she gets her moment in the sun, she’s adamant it’ll all be worth it in the end.
Operating under the belief that 15 minutes of fame will cure her crippling isolation and the absence of any endorsement from her family or peers, Sara ends up in a psychiatric ward for her troubles. By the time her first bout of electrical therapy is over, she’s not the same person anymore, and she never will be again, a harrowing scenario that would have never come to pass in the first place had somebody – regardless of who they were – paid her the attention she was so desperately and transparently craving.
By the time the credits roll, in her mind at least, she’s a star. The words muttered to herself when she starts guzzling the pills ended up becoming eerily prophetic. “I’m Sara Goldfarb, not Albert Einstein,” she said, not that it would have required a history-making genius to warn her of what was to come. Unfortunately, in what’s essentially her character arc as a whole, there was nobody around to tell her.
