The Fountain

What does a 16th century conquistador, a contemporary doctor/cancer researcher and a 26th century astronaut have in common? Besides Rachel Weisz, not much, but they do occupy the imagination of Darren Aronofsky thus we're bound to go see them. Let's get this out of the way, it is not a great film, but it isn't a horrible film either as some critiques would have you believe. If you look on Rotten Tomatoes you will see an even 50/50 split in terms of reviews. Although a film requires 60 tomatoes to be considered fresh, vs. splats, it fascinates me to see people so divided over this film, and so evenly divided at that. It is the division, those pieces of art that we can't all decide on that seem interesting enough to go see, so at the very least you can decide for yourself.

So why am I defending Aronofsky? Well quite simply, because he has ambition and that comes out in this film. It came out in freshman and sophomore efforts, Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky has quirks, not unlike penmanship, he has a definite way of presenting his films and motifs that run through them. Take for example the "eye" and when his characters get high in Requiem he films a pupil expanding and dilating as a way of punctuating the act and experience. Same too, all forms of movement, vehicular, is done in a kind of overhead manner where you might as well be suspended by your feet watching a car approach, and then the camera turns as it passes underneath it and you get a slight birds eye view of it speeding away and into a destination. It's these small touches that, small hash marks in Aronofsky's column, that make it impossible for me to hate The Fountain.

Visually the fountain is superb. Aronofsky takes aspects of the dreamy blackness of Arthur C Clarke's Monolith and expands it with today's CG to make a milky gas chamber of space where a bubbled tree floating through the pin prick cosmos seems possible, and steered by a bald headed, tattooed captain living on the tree's sap and his own memories to torture him for light years, an absolutely mesmerizing experience. It fits, not well, but does fit. What Aronofsky has mastered at a "young" age is pacing. Very few films are as well paced musically as this one and his previous efforts. There is a symbiotic relationship between Kronos Quartet and Aronofsky, they may have done a Vulcan mind meld, I don't know, but he is capable of using their music to absolutely pace the narrative and moods of his films. The music is there to help you feel what the picture and action convey. Here however, the music is so well done and planned that it no only suggests and heightens it gives you the amplitude of that feeling, paints the color of that emotion and explains why you should feel the way you do in a Peter Frampton sort of way.

The fountain is a visually enjoyable film in the same way that 2001 seems to be something to decode; the fountain's code isn't that deep. Or, it can be said that the script (Thanks John) is too simple. Aronofsky isn't asking questions of great profundity, he isn't asking fundamentally new questions, he's making his characters angry at the certainties in our world: death (not sure about taxes). And this problem, this dilemma du death, has been dealt with before: Frankenstein, Dracula, Jesus is a way of dealing with this certain problem. Our hero however decides to take the Mayan approach and go star tripping with a very large piece of mythical fauna in order to find his inner Siddhartha. These things don't add up, a researcher off his rocker because his wife died who says "death is a disease" isn't amounting to a story line that can't really convince you the reader that the researcher was a conquistador searching for the same thing and is en route to a dying star in order to be reborn in a future about 600 years off. You just don't buy it, but each sequence is kind of enjoyable on its own. You want more of those small soft moments between Jackman and Weisz, but Weisz doesn't make a very good Isabella of Spain, besieged by the Spanish Inquisition. It just doesn't add up because it doesn't follow history. For those of you that know a little history you will remember that Ponce de Leon is the one that history associates with the fountain of youth. Catherine married Ferdinand and together they rid Spain of The Moors and The Jews. They were comfortably in bed with the Inquisition and you kind of want to assume that the grand inquisitor in the film is really Thomas de Torquemada, even though he is named Grand Inquisitor Silecio.

These small inconsistencies make the film difficult to digest, but it's the eye candy, softly painted, not blazing guns and flying shells, but rather broad stroked sepia tones motifs and dim colors that drive this film. As The Chronicle’s critique so aptly notices, there a mandallas every where in this movie, something to remind us of the cosmic order and unity that exists in a moment of singularity. Isabel (the queen) is hiding behind a massively ornate mandalla when Tomas the Conquistador is summoned to her. These moments, these codexes aren't enough to make the philosophical meanderings of the story come together in a coherent narrative. Rumor has it that the originally requested budget for the film was 70 million and was cut in half. Maybe we are left feeling half cheated at the end because of this. Whatever you think of the film after seeing it, if you do, reflect on the fact that you will still have strings echoing in your head and a disdain for daylight, it is atmospheric and the atmosphere kind of sticks to your clothing like smoky bars.