Fountain, The [DVD Combo]

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Those of you who read my previous comments on "The Fountain" may remember that I didn't like the film's story or characters very much, but I did enjoy the film's visual style. So I suppose that sharpening up the picture in high definition does, indeed, improve the situation. What's more, Warner Bros. offer the film on one of their HD-DVD and DVD Combo discs, making the movie accessible to more people and convenient to play on any HD-DVD or DVD machine in your house or a friend's. I admit I still don't like the movie much, but at least the new HD transfer is easy on the eye.

Anyway, after watching Darren Aronofsky's latest set of cinematic images, 2006's "The Fountain," I felt as though 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. The birds are 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 his theatrical review of "The Fountain," my colleague Chris Long made an apt comparison to Stanley Kubrick's "2001," a comparison not flattering to "The Fountain." Certainly, as with "The Fountain," one can see "2001" as merely 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 put 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," as good as it was, never quite 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 of diminishing returns in Aronofsky's films.

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 mystical journey of enlightenment, a weighty emblem for the meaning of life and death. It seems like the kind of thing the Beatles might have embraced thirty or forty years ago. 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. That 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 tortuosa 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.) It's also 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 questions: What is death, and how can we 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 very slowly for no discernable reason except to appear portentous and significant.

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 fancy photography, special effects, lighting, sets, costumes, or editing, as attractive and efficient as they may be. 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 spoof, but I wouldn't bet on it.

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