Movie Review: The Fountain

Warning: SPOILERS! Don't read if you haven't seen the movie and/or don't want the plot given away.

I'd read a fair amount of press on this movie and was already familiar with both the praises and the criticisms it had garnered. After seeing it last night I pretty much have to agree with both. Visually, it's beyond stunning, and I'm glad I saw it on the big screen. It has that trademark Aronofsky obsession with pattern, with multiple short sequences whose visual composition is initially abstract then resolves itself into something identifiable. (My favorite of these turned out to be the inside of an elevator). The stop-gap editing that made both Pi and Requeum for a Dream so lurching to watch has been abandoned for a calmer, more linear flow. Apparently he felt he had more of a story to tell this time around. I really can't exaggerate how much emphasis is placed throughout the movie on detail. I could watch it all over again and pay no attention to the people this time through, but just look at the sets.

The people give mostly great performances. As an excuse to look at (drool over) Hugh Jackman for two hours, you can't go wrong (though the shirtless quotient is a bit low for my taste), and as usual he's more than just eye candy. Rachel Weisz I can always take or leave, but she was convincing in the role as a woman dying of a brain tumor. Ellen Burstyn was fantastic in her cameo role.

Much has been written about the supposedly confusing story of the movie, and I'm puzzled by how literally many of the critics have taken its "three time periods" conceit. Presumably the movie is about a couple who are continually reincarnated throughout time, always to be separated, always to be reunited. I'd like to offer a much more prosaic explanation of what's happening. The movie spends most of its time on the modern-day couple: the dying wife and her biochemist husband obsessed with finding a magic drug that will cure brain tumors. Given that this part of the movie is set in present day, we're meant to find it believable. Well, it's all pretty ludicrous. The "conflict" between Hugh Jackman's character and the other people in his lab is inflated for maximum emotional effect, but the fact is, no serious research scientist, no matter how consumed he is by his wife's approaching death, could believe if he just works hard enough and keeps inventing new combinations of drugs, he'll find a "cure" for something as nebulous as brain tumors. As visually and aurally arresting as the lab scenes are, they're utter fluff. Much more convincing is the love and concern between the couple. She's ready to die, he's not ready to let her go. The night before she actually does die, she passes to him a manuscript she's been writing called "The Fountain," a romantic historical fantasy set in whatever-th century Spain, and asks him to "Finish it." This exchange between the two of them figures prominently throughout the movie: "Finish it." "I don't know how it ends."

OK, so what about the other two couples - the "historical" one and the "future" one? The first are the characters in Izzy's manuscript. I thought the movie made this explicit, albeit not right away... but from the first time Hugh's character picks it up and reading, we are repeatedly thrown back into this historic world where the Queen of Spain sends a Conquistadore to the New World to find the hidden Mayan pyramid that houses the Tree of Life. Sure, Aronofsky uses a pile of symbolism and congruent dialogue to suggest that the Queen/Conquistadore couple are just an older incarnation of the modern-day couple... but I interpret this as Jackman's character simply superimposing the imagery and dilemmas of his present life onto the characters and story in the manuscript. There is no reason to believe that the Queen, the Conquistadore, or the mysterious Mayan shaman guarding the pyramid are "real" people.

As for the "future" Hugh Jackman, and his dying tree in a flying soap bubble... again I see no reason to believe that this is meant to be a real person. The entire scene is too fantastical, too over-the-top, and the movie provides NO explanation for how a bald man and a tree could come to inhabit a soap bubble that is whipping through a nebula toward the dying star at its center. (At least the "historical" sequences have a narrative, no matter how silly or historically inaccurate). I interpret these sequences as the present-day character's allegory for his central dilemma: he can't accept death. And he REALLY can't accept his wife's impending death. In his head, the whole thing turns cosmic and grand, suffused with symbolism from her manuscript. Her voice and visage continue to haunt his bald doppelganger as he wrestles with "the answer."

So, the basic message of this film is, we have to accept death as a form of rebirth. Stated so simply, the sheer lavishness and over-romanticization of the film feel like so much pomp and circumstance to me. I can't help but wonder how the Aronofsky of his previous two movies would have told this story - the research scientist, the dying wife - if he'd stayed true to the unrelenting gritty realism of those films. Instead we're given a fable set within an allegory that the main character has created to distance himself from the gritty reality of what's happening to his wife. I don't really blame Aronofsky for taking this gamble - but I think it all detracts from what could have been a much simpler, more effective film.

I'm giving it a 7 out of 10, a bit higher than I'd like given my criticisms of it... but it is absolutely gorgeous and the nonlinear weaving of the three narratives did a good job of delaying my inevitable disappointment with the simplicity of the story/message at its center.