How many times have you seen someone on the news (or more often on Oprah) telling everyone to live for the moment? Maybe it’s a cancer survivor, or maybe someone who has narrowly escaped death at the hands of a disgruntled ex, but the message is always the same: they never realized how important life’s little moments were. Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is like one of those people, except less sincere. As both a love story and a meditation on life and death, it’s a film full of intellectual ideas in search of an emotional heart.
The Fountain stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as what appears to be the same couple in a triptych of stories spanning 1,000 years. The first story, which takes place in about the year 1500, is about a conquistador who goes to the New World to save Queen Isabella of Spain from a bloodthirsty inquisitor bent on overthrowing the monarchy. In the second story, a modern-day drug researcher discovers a miracle drug while trying to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumour before it kills her. The third story is a beautifully trippy but mystifying bit of futuristic weirdness in which Jackman’s shaven-headed spacefarer zooms toward a dying star in a bubble-ship just big enough for him and a gnarled old tree that may or may not contain Weisz’s dormant body. Mixed into a nonlinear narrative, these three stories have elements that seem to overlap (and they have endings that could be considered similar), but we’re never quite clear about why or how.
So what’s the deal? Is this pair of star-crossed lovers immortal? Are they reincarnated? Is the whole thing a messed-up dream Jackman’s character is having? There are some cryptic clues seeded throughout the film: an unfinished book that modern-day Weisz is writing; an ancient Mayan myth about where people go when they die; and a tree that may hold the secret of eternal life. But these clues are ambiguous; this is not a film for people who like their movie meanings served up plain (and that includes anyone who goes in thinking the film is sci-fi). Aronofsky want us to do the intellectual heavy lifting.
Unfortunately, that intelligence works against the film’s one obvious point. Aronofsky, whose previous two films (1998’s Pi and 2000’s Requiem for a Dream) also combined moments of powerful intensity with moments of incomprehensible strangeness, is a strong technical director, and clearly a guy who lives in his head a lot of the time. The ideas driving this film are big ones, and a certain scene is repeated enough for us to get the drift that it has something to do with living in the moment instead of obsessing about the past or the future. But thinking about living in the moment is not living in the moment—and that’s the problem with the film.
Jackman and Weisz both give impressive performances (and both spend a fair amount of time with tears in their eyes). They don’t have the kind of chemistry that starts Hollywood rumours, but chemistry isn’t the issue here. There’s a sterility to the proceedings, a clinical distance even in the super-extreme close-ups of the peach fuzz on Weisz’s skin responding to Jackman’s touch. The Fountain is ultimately a love story we observe objectively, without emotion. It’s all head and no heart, a film that shows us a lot of brilliantly photographed moments but never finds the life in them. At least when those grateful people on TV say it’s best to live every moment, you know they mean it.
(2.5/4)