Fountain, The

Izzi's story (titled, coincidentally enough, "The Fountain") serves as a pretext for the film's 15th century scenes. It is also the weakest of the three story lines. Involving a mysterious dagger, secret Mayan rituals, a quest for the fountain of youth, and a barely-sketched romance between a conquistador (Jackman) and Queen Isabella (Weisz), Izzi's story plays like "The Da Vinci Code" as written for the Harlequin Romance market. It's understandable that Tom doesn't have the heart to tell his dying wife that she's a lousy writer, but this dull plot strand never moves beyond the most superficial level, consisting mostly on a few rushed battle scenes and a whole bunch of mumbled Mayan mythology.

"The Fountain" can survive this misstep, however, because the future segment is its real powerhouse. In these scenes, a fully shaven Tom, looking an awful lot like David Carradine from "Kung Fu," travels through space in a bubble, with a mystical tree (presumably the ceiba tree or "Tree of Life" of the Mayan mythos) as his only companion. He travels the Milky Way on the road to Xibalba, a nebula which, as Izzi previously explained, represents the Mayan underworld. Here he hopes to bring back his dearly departed back to life. Along the way, he hears voices, eats some tree bark, and assumes the lotus position.

I suspect that viewers will either embrace or reject "The Fountain" mostly on the basis of these futuristic scenes, the most ambitious of the film. While some of the effects (many using photochemical, rather than CGI, processes) are pretty nifty, I found the images rather flat and uninspired. The obvious comparison here is to "2001: A Space Odyssey," but these scenes looked more like an commercial for the local Yoga And Spiritual Wellness Center than a modern rendition of "the ultimate trip." In addition, Aronofsky's New Age metaphysics provide only the thinnest veneer of profundity. It's the circle of life death is the road to awe the beginning is really the end the end is really the beginning and what if, uhh, C-A-T really spelled dog? Hey, wait, Izzi, her name's a palindrome: see, it's all cyclical and stuff. Deep man, like way down under.

Even forgiving the New Age glibness, the real problem lies at the very heart of the film, or rather its lack of heart. The tag line is "What if you could live forever?" but it could just as well be "What if you could love forever?" The story derives all of its dramatic power from the love between Tom and Izzi, a love that spans millennia and transcends thousands of light years. Unfortunately, we see minimal evidence of this eternal romance on screen. We know that Tom loves his wife because he says he does, but aside from a barrage of sweaty close-ups highlighting his anguish, he shows little sense of passion. Izzi is merely an ephemeral presence who exists only to die gracefully and thereby push her poor, beleaguered man beyond the limits of his endurance. The romance is even less convincing in the Spanish scenes, where Queen Isabella only has a distant, cordial relationship with her conquistador. Without a palpable, plausible romance to serve as the engine, the future scenes sputter for all their visual inventiveness, they feel hollow and perfunctory.

No doubt "The Fountain" will have its share of ardent defenders, most likely from that youth demographic the director has targeted. It certainly has its virtues, most notably its painful earnestness and the open-ended nature of the narrative. Aronofsky clearly believes in his story passionately, and has pulled out all the stops to present his vision on the screen. Perhaps the film, with its long and troubled production history, wasn't exactly what he wanted, but at least there's nothing coy or ironic about it. Aronofsky, much like Kubrick in "2001," also wisely avoids all but the slimmest of exposition, leaving "The Fountain" open to multiple interpretations. Though Izzi writes the story about 15th century Spain, she could just as easily be remembering a real past life. The Tom we see in the future may or may not be the same character as we see in the present perhaps the whole future storyline is a fantasy construction of Tom's grief-stricken imagination. Fans will enjoy debating all the possible permutations, assuring the film a vibrant second life on Internet message boards for years to come.

With all of the parallels to "2001," defenders of "The Fountain" have already begun to trot out the early negative reviews garnered by Kubrick's film (especially Pauline Kael's hack job) as evidence that "The Fountain" is also a misunderstood masterpiece. The claim may be an accurate one, but the argument is wholly misguided. You can find negative reviews of any canonized film. It does not logically follow, however, that any film that initially receives poor reviews will one day be hailed as a masterpiece. I'm sure that some enterprising critic will eventually make an eloquent argument for Uwe Boll as the new Orson Welles, but I don't expect "Bloodrayne" to knock "Citizen Kane" out of the AFI Top 100 any time soon.

"The Fountain" is not the disaster the Venice jeers might suggest, but it's also far from the visionary masterpiece Aronofsky and company would like us to believe it is. At least it's not guilty of being overlong. The film has two of the essential qualities required to guarantee cult hit status: it is by a favored auteur, and it is a genre piece. It may become even more than that, no matter what the critics like me who just don't "get it" have to say.

Video:
For a film of such visual splendor, I wish I could say that the standard-definition transfer does it justice; maybe we'll have to wait for the high-def version for that. What we get is done up at a high bit rate in anamorphic widescreen, but because Aronofsky chooses to film so much of the movie in darkness, we don't really get a lot of clear delineation or bright colors. So, the film ends up looking about blurred and fuzzy as its content.

The movie's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio shows up as expected at the 1.78:1 size of a widescreen television, meaning that a little information is lost to the sides. Colors, even though they are most often seen in darkness, look natural and realistic enough, but as I say, definition is only so-so. Images are on the soft side, sometimes with what appears to be a dull sheen or veneer over them. Fortunately, there are no digital defects, grain, or noise to spoil the overall clarity of the screen.

Audio:
The Dolby Digital 5.1 sonics convey an abundance of weird sounds quite well in the surrounds, and the musical score opens up nicely across the front and rear channels. The dynamics are wide, the transient impact strong, and the bass deep. There is nothing here that overpowers the dialogue or distracts from the story, yet the soundtrack is every bit as good as the imagery is stunning, coming into its own in things like thunder and rain.

Extras:
The primary bonus item is a set of six featurettes, collectively called "Inside The Fountain: Death and Rebirth," which exploring the movie's various periods and settings. They may be played all at once, and together run about thirty minutes. These behind-the-scenes looks at the filmmaking are titled "Australia," "The 21st Century," "Spain--16th Century," "New Spain," "The Endless Field," and "The Future," and they takes us through the movie's filmmaking process from beginning to end. One might ask why the filmmakers had to divide the documentary as they did and give each segment so weighty a title, but, then, one could ask the same thing of the feature film.

In addition, the disc includes a widescreen theatrical trailer; twenty-three scene selections but no chapter insert; a musical-album insert promo; trailers at start-up only for three other WB and New Line films; English and French spoken languages; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Parting Shots:
The day before I watched "The Fountain," I watched "The Painted Veil," both movies fundamentally tragic love stories. Yet "The Painted Veil" moved me almost to tears, while I felt practically nothing at the end of "The Fountain." So, what made the difference? The characters in "The Painted Veil" behave like real, live, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings, whose personalities shift and change as do real people's. The characters in "The Fountain" serve only as symbols; we learn little about them, nor do we care much about them except what the filmmaker intends them to represent. Thus, it's hard to care about their story, either, or, ultimately, the movie.

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