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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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