The Fountain (2006)

June 16, 2007, 13:45Logan

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An odyssey of one man and his eternal struggle to save the woman he loves. The primary focus is on modern-day scientist Tommy Creo (Hugh Jackman), who is desperate to find a cure for the cancer killing his beloved wife, Isabel (Rachel Weisz). She, however, is ready to accept her fate, even researching and writing a novel based upon Mayan and Christian tales. 16th-century Spanish conquistador, Tomas, goes on a quest in the Mayan jungles of New Spain to find the Tree of Life, which God hid after the fall of man in the Garden of Eden, in order to save Spain’s Queen Isabella. Then we jump ahead and see Tommy as a 26th-century astronaut, traveling through deep space in a giant orb, with a dying tree, towards a golden nebula. Tom is grappling with the same mysteries that have consumed the conquistador and Tommy for a millennium, but finally The Fountain converges into one truth, as the Thomas of all periods–warrior, scientist, and explorer–comes to terms with life, love, death and rebirth.

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Rated: PG-13 for some intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and language.
Runtime: 96 min

There you have it: The Fountain, a film that defies description, summation, and expectation. Exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad, it is also — no way around this — truly strange. Which is probably one of the reasons why I loved it. I’m drawn to movies which take more than a cursory glance to understand. However strange you think it is, it’s stranger. Plopping Hugh Jackman into a giant soap bubble isn’t the half of it, but it’s a fine place to meditate on the movie’s oddness. The Fountain is cinema as poetry; romance as revelation; science fiction as prayer. It ponders death as a form of ecstasy.

As a writer and director, Darren Aronofsky has never been one to shy from either the morbid or the ecstatic, and he’s yet to make a conventional film of any kind. His most recent feature, 2000’s Requiem for a Dream, concerned four addicts chasing different forms of bliss, while his breakout Pi followed an obsessive math whiz on a quest to find the 216-digit name for God. In Aronofsky’s movies, the path to enlightenment — that “road to awe” — is never a simple journey.

A lot happens in The Fountain, though it’s barely an hour and a half long. The monkey-brain researcher is married to a terminally ill author (Rachel Weisz, a vision on her own), who’s almost finished with a manuscript titled, of course, The Fountain. Her book follows Jackman’s conquistador to Central America, where he’s been enjoined by Queen Isabella of Spain (Weisz again) to find a mythical pyramid that guards the Tree of Life — which was hidden by God after Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden.

Meanwhile, inside the orb, bald Jackman speaks to a tree containing the soul of his lost love while the two of them rise through space toward a nebula which the Mayan’s claimed as their underworld and called Xibalbá. Simple romantic comedy right?

The Fountain reminds me much of “2001: A Space Odyssey” Stanley Kubrick’s slow motion science-fiction masterpiece. Audiences hated it, but now it is considered one of the top five greatest sci-fi movies of all time. Yet it shares two things with the Fountain. First: This is one outlandish film, and many viewers will hate it. Hate. It. Second: It’s nevertheless a transcendent work of art, a vision of undying love that finds hope in grief and epiphany in death. Breathtaking visuals and an urgent score combine with a quixotic screenplay and Jackman’s guts-bared performance to create a work which left me transfixed: eyes wide open, awed.

Aronofsky critiques the scientific goal to “stop dying” and encourages an enlightened, blissful response to death’s inevitability. Clad in a simple garment, with his head shaven, the hermit-like astronaut Tom Creo ironically resembles a Buddhist monk, though Tom is far from being at peace (the film also checks in with Mayan and Christian concepts). Creo’s encounter with eternity finds the film abandoning the literal, and mainstream audiences may throw up their arms by the time Jackman starts floating around in the lotus position. Dealing with death may not be the most seductive date-movie topic after a long week, but it is one that’s universally relevant.

The flip side of Aronofsky’s compelling metaphysical noodling is a drama that defies rational narrative. In this way, it remains open to interpretation without the burden of snugly fitting together those puzzle pieces. Are the three time lines an expression of reincarnation? Maybe. Time travel? Of a sort. But in my opinion, the whole film take place in the present, as a man struggles to come to terms with his wife’s death? She has authored a fiction of the past, and that story and the future element are simply allegories or pictures of this timeless quest to let go of life and embrace death. At one point Jackman says: “Death is a disease, it’s like any other. And there’s a cure… and I will find it.” Sadly the answer he finds will end only in death, and not the everlasting life which he seeks. As Christians we hold the cure. The secret to life everlasting.

Aronofsky’s often dazzling technique is tasteful, his tone austere, and the sets are stylized to befit a dreamy fable. It’s all part of an ultimate Q&A that concludes with the answers to “What is life?” and “What is death?” maybe one and the same. Will audiences care to listen? Probably not, but here’s the kind of artful, textured, defiantly non-mainstream gamble more filmmakers should be taking. For that reason I awarded it with a story value of “divine encounter.” Because if it can get people thinking about everlasting life being more than a fountain of youth to sustain this body. If this movie can cause people to begin thinking that perhaps the soul does live on after the body dies, then it is our job to fill in those blanks and answer those questions with Jesus.