Fountain, The

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Note: In the following joint critique, John wrote up the first film review, the video, audio, extras, and concluding remarks, and Chris wrote the second film review. Note also that both John and Chris include some spoilers in their analyses. Proceed with caution.

The Film According to John:
I couldn't help thinking after watching Darren Aronofsky's latest set of cinematic images, 2006's "The Fountain," that I had just seen a flock of exotic birds flying overhead. The images are fascinating, bizarre, beautiful, sometimes dazzlingly, but beyond their appearance they don't mean a lot unless one relates them to some strong personal meaning that may or may not make any sense to anyone else. Not that I have anything against beauty per se; one may view works of art endlessly if the art possesses enough aesthetic merit or if it is complex enough or subtle enough to convey multiple levels of appreciation. But when Aronofsky simply strings together images almost at random as he does here, with little beyond a vague metaphysical story line to connect them, they fly by as fast as those birds do. They're attractive, and they're gone, and their meaning is that they're flying from one place to another. Unless you choose to make them into a metaphor, as Aronofsky might do, and then maybe they are the wings of destiny or the ethereal embodiment of all natural wonder or your grandmother's petticoat.

In Chris's comments below he mentions Kubrick's "2001." It's an apt comparison because certainly one can also see "2001" as a string of pretty pictures. But Kubrick had the good sense to do more--to linger over his shots long enough for a person to enjoy them, to support them with some of the world's finest music, and, most important, to infuse them with something more profound than, as Chris puts it, "New Age glibness." I might add, too, that Kubrick tried his "2001" approach a few years later, transposing it to eighteenth-century Europe; but without the weight of a meaningful thematic thread behind it, "Barry Lyndon" never measured up to its more-ambitious predecessor.

Understand, I liked the two previous Aronofsky films I'd seen, "Pi" (1998) and "Requiem for a Dream" (2000), although I must admit that I liked "Pi" better than "Requiem." So, maybe I'm finding a point here of diminishing returns in Aronofsky's films. Or maybe it's just me and Chris, as he didn't seem to like the new film much more than I did; I don't know.

Here's the thing: Aronofsky took an essentially simple but tragic love story between a man and his dying wife and tried to turn it into a weighty emblem for the meaning of life and death and a spiritual journey of enlightenment. I have no objection, except that the movie has little to say that other people haven't said before, therefore making the end result seem shallow and superficial. According to Aronofsky, we die and become one with the universe. We die and live on eternally in the flowers and trees. Basically, the writer/director takes ninety-six minutes to say little more than this, all the while making the movie seem far deeper and more penetrating than it really is. Unless I missed something along the way, which would not have been hard, given the convoluted way Aronofsky chooses to tell his story.

The plot spans perhaps thousands of years, we never know, if you consider the flashback and the possible dream forward. In the present Hugh Jackman plays a doctor whose wife, played by Rachel Weisz, is dying of a brain tumor. He desperately tries to find a cure for it, possibly by using the extract of a South American tree. Meanwhile, his wife in her final days writes all but the last chapter of a book called "The Fountain" about Queen Isabel of Spain sending a sixteenth-century conquistador on an expedition to the New World to find the "Tree of Life," which will grant folks eternal life. Thereby comes at least a part of the title's meaning, as in the Fountain of Youth. Anyway, it's clear that she has her husband in mind as the conquistador, so when the husband reads what she has written, the director takes us back to that time period, with Jackman as the aforementioned Spanish soldier. And the doctor must write the final chapter to his wife's book because only he will know how his life will end and what spiritual knowledge he will gain from exploring his wife's dying. You see, even the book she's writing is a symbol of their lives. Or their petticoats.

Things get really far out, though, when we find the doctor floating within a giant bubble in some other timeless galaxy, seeking the answer to life's most unanswered question: What is death and how may we cope with or overcome it? I'm sure Aronofsky intended the man and the bubble to remind us of the star child in the closing shot of "2001," again making Chris's reference all the more relevant. The difference is that Aronofsky's image looks silly and could evoke more chuckles than wonder.

Frankly, I found "The Fountain" pretentious and boring. Pretentious because the movie takes itself so seriously (I don't think there's more than a single smile in the entire film, but when the subject matter involves a brain tumor, I don't suppose there is much to smile about), yet it offers up so much less than it suggests. Boring because it moves along so very slowly for no discernable reason except to appear portentous and significant, which it isn't.

I'm sure that many viewers will find "The Fountain" a fine example of fresh, new, innovative filmmaking, but I did not. Indeed, I found most of "The Fountain" fairly conventional. I saw nothing particularly creative about Aronofsky's nonlinear narrative, his time shifts, his photography, special effects, lighting, sets, costumes, or editing. Nor did I think his major premise, that we all attain eternal life through our eventual comingling with nature, novel or fresh. If anything, it is a rather conservative, politically correct philosophy that neatly avoids the messy proposition of an after life. Of course, Aronofsky may have meant the whole movie as a satire, a Christopher Guest put-on, but I wouldn't bet on it.

No, the strength of "The Fountain" is in its love story, and the fact that so many people are willing to go to great lengths and transcend all boundaries for the ones they cherish, whether it's necessary or not. It's too bad this element was not developed further or better explicated. Also, as I suggested in the beginning, I enjoyed many of the visuals, the sets, the costumes, especially the spacey other-galaxy business, even if they were somewhat old hat. I enjoyed Clint Mansell's melancholy musical track, on which we hear the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai. Furthermore, I enjoyed how professionally Jackman and Weisz carried out their parts, which was at least to get through them without giggling.

All in all, "The Fountain" is more a middling entry in the message/sci-fi/fantasy genre than the groundbreaking venture its ponderous tone would lead us to believe. It's hard to take seriously lines like "Our bodies are prisons for our souls," "Death is an act of creation," or "Death is the road to awe." The aphorisms begin to sound like transcendental greeting cards.

The Film According to Chris:
After a troubled screening at Venice where the film was met with a scattering of boos, Darren Aronofsky arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival with a two-pronged strategy to promote his long-in-the-making project, "The Fountain." Part One was defense. Aronofsky explained to the crowd that "The Fountain" was "very different" from his previous work, and implored the audience to forget all about "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream." Part Two was offense. Aronofsky claimed to be delighted to see "such a young crowd" (the lighting must not have been very good from where he was standing) because that's who "The Fountain" is really meant for.

Aronofsky's intention was obvious: divide and conquer, or, more appropriately, divide and pander. "The Fountain" is meant only for the hippest viewers, the ones who "get it," and not for the old farts (i.e. critics) who don't. It's an effective strategy which both neutralizes any dissent, and further encourages supporters by lauding them for their manifest wisdom and good taste.

"The Fountain" takes place over three time periods: 15th century Spain in the era of the conquistadors, present day, and an indeterminate time in the future (identified in trailers, but not in the film, as approximately 2500 A.D.) With such an epic scope, it's surprising that the film runs at a mere 96 minutes, but Aronofsky achieves this by condensing the past and future episodes and focusing mostly on the present-day story.

[WARNING FOR READERS: The rest of the review contains significant spoilers.]

In the present-day action, Tom Verde (Hugh Jackman) is a doctor who experiments on animals in order to develop a treatment for brain tumors, which is pretty convenient considering that his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) suffers from the same ailment. When we first meet the doomed couple, Izzi has a bad relapse and her health begins to deteriorate rapidly. Izzi accepts her fate, Tom doesn't. Unflinchingly chipper, she puts on a brave face for Tom, but this doesn't stop the good doctor from working feverishly to advance his research, much to the consternation of his fellow doctors who believe, quite correctly, that his behavior is reckless. While Tom works day and night to save her, all that Izzi really wants is for Tom to read the new book she has written, and to finish writing the last chapter after she dies.

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