By Matt Zoller Seitz
Part sci-fi head trip, part swoony romance and part pop-philosophical manifesto, The Fountain is a gusher of poetic imagery, extravagant yet controlled. Hugh Jackman plays three incarnations of a hero: a conquistador trying to find the Fountain of Youth, a present-day cancer researcher who's in denial over his wife's impending death, and a 26th century astronaut piloting a translucent starship into a disintegrating nebula believed to be the gateway to the afterlife. But because the tales are not merely intercut, but densely interwoven -- with images from one section being quoted, alluded to or expanded upon in another -- The Fountain feels less like an anthology of thematically similar short stories than variations of the same narrative developed on parallel planes. When the movie cuts away from one period, you feel as though the story is still moving forward even though you're not there to see it. Every scene -- indeed, every shot -- has been composed, designed, blocked and lit for maximum aesthetic oomph. You can envision the storyboards pinned on a production office wall, each drawing accompanied by a typewritten sheet explaining why every creative touch, however seemingly small, is integral to the film's vision. 
But the go-to lazy critic phrase "Every frame is a painting" won't do here, because it implies the possibility of absorbing what's in front of you while it's in front of you, and this film makes such perceptual spelunking impossible. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky's imagination apparently has just one mode, fast-forward; like his first two features, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain unreels like the longest and ripest of movie trailers; Aronofsky and his regular editor, Jay Rabinowitz, hold each image long enough to register, but rarely long enough to penetrate and astonish. Aronofsky's pedal-to-the-metal approach suited Pi, an enigmatic mathematical-philosophical puzzle, and Requiem for a Dream, which might be the greatest drug movie ever because its form is dictated by the character of addiction, which prizes the satisfaction of appetite over everything else. But The Fountain is, in theory, a much more introspective movie -- a romantic-philosophical-spiritual quest -- and as such, Aronofsky's approach seems as counterintuitive as zipping through St. Peter's Basilica on rollerblades. Though the film's 96-minute running time might sound like a plus, there were many points when I wished The Fountain wasn't in such a hurry. A film on themes this universal is entitled, even obligated, to linger -- not on every moment, but on moments that put allusions and foreshadowings and visual rhymes aside and concentrate on the hero's feelings at the moment he feels them.
But would a more relaxed, meditative approach have revealed greater depths? I doubt it. The Fountain isn't as conceptually rich or as philosophically complex as Solaris or 2001 or even The Life Aquatic (to name three movies that strain after cosmic significance). And it's not as achingly emotional as A Prairie Home Companion, All That Jazz or the dumb but powerful Somewhere in Time, to name three films about death, love and the limits of mortal control. The Fountain's express-train-to-profundity approach seems more like cover for a movie that's not as fully conceived or fully felt as it could be. I don't doubt it was a deeply personal project for Aronofsky; he spent six years struggling to get it made. But what's onscreen too often struck me as theoretical and not lived-in. Aronofsky's prismatic story is rooted in primal emotions and sutuations -- a man's grief over his wife's death, his guilt over not appreciating her in life, and his obsessive five-century quest to defeat death and find a way to reunite with her. On paper, that's one of the most imaginative illustrations of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' second stage of grief -- denial -- in movie history. Unfortunately, while The Fountain is dazzlingly constructed (dazzling in the sleight-of-hand sense; more on that in a moment) what's onscreen feels like a reconstructed version of a legendary movie that was lost or butchered. It's a movie comprised of indicators of emotions rather than actual emotions -- an outline of a heartbreaker.
No one can accuse the film of lacking ambition. The 26th century thread, which has the trippy majesty of a Heavy Metal story, finds the astronaut Tom (Jackman), a pale, bald dreamer, heading toward a dying nebula. His spaceship looks like a soap bubble but functions as a greenhouse; the bottom half of its interior is a hemisphere of earth and nutrients, providing sustenance for Thomas and a mystical gnarled tree whose significance will become clear as the movie unfolds. As he travels, he passes the time by meditating in zero gravity, air-kissing the tree bark (its tiny tendrils, charged by static electricity, straighten and reach for Tom's lips like neck hairs awakened by gooseflesh) and practicing tai-chi (a lovely image, with Tom's graceful figure silhouetted against a starfield that seems to be falling like snow behind him). Tom also cuts pieces of bark from the tree and cooks it down into a drug (the closeups suggest the smack preparation scenes in Requiem) and has conversations with a ghostly woman (Rachel Weisz) who keeps entreating him to "finish it." These rituals feel familiar, even warm, although we don't yet know their scientific or emotional significance. Aside from the ghost woman's appearances -- which despite their enigmatic presentation, have a thudding, Six Feet Under literalness -- you may feel a rush of anticipation. 
This sense of promise can also be felt in the movie's 15th century Latin American sequences, which find Tomas (Jackman), a conquistador, searching for the source of immortality in order to save Queen Isabella (Weisz) from death at the hands of the self-flagellating, heretic-killing religious fanatics who've taken over Spain. Like all three sections, this one is conceived in the broad-stroke terms of a hallucination (or a silent movie). Tomas and his men penetrate the vine-choked base of a temple and enter a narrow stone passageway that proves to be a trap; natives surround and decimate them, leaving only brave Tomas to push forward, hacking his way through bushels of enemy soldiers until he reaches the base of a ziggurat's terraced side. If Matthew Libatique's voluptuously dark, grainy photography and Clint Mansell's pulsating synthesized score didn't clue you in that you're watching an allegory, the next sequence of shots leave no doubt: from Tomas' POV, the ziggurat seems to stretch upward forever, practically disappearing into starry sky, and when Aronofsky cuts to a long shot of Tomas' antlike figure climbing toward the structure's peak, toward a duel with a soldier guarding the fabled Tree of Life and its immortality-bestowing nectar, the image is so storybook that it earns a grin. It doesn't look real and it isn't supposed to. Like the analog special effects in Bram Stoker's Dracula and the Quay Brothers' films, with their forced perspectives and baroque textures, this sequence's effects are more emotionally than physically convincing. They're allegorical images, a simple and evocative as Tom's Glinda-Good-Witch-of-the-North spaceship and the shimmering galactic panoramas it traverses. The latter, created by English photographer Peter Parks, are not CGI images, but macro closeups of chemicals in a petri dish; versions of the starfield appear elsewhere in the movie, pulsing in the sky over the 15th century matte-painted jungles or writhing on a microscope slide. These handmade effects are both comforting and unnerving; they're dreamscapes.
The whole movie is a dreamscape -- or at least it strives to feel that way. Aronofsky segues from one version of the story to another so subtly that it takes you a minute to realize what period you're in. The present-tense narrative, which finds driven scientist Tommy (Jackman) running experiments on a monkey as a Hail Mary attempt to cure his brain cancer-stricken wife, Izzi (Weisz again), is photographed in smoky gold hues, as if Tommy's whole world is trapped in amber. The hero is running from the hard reality of his situation; his marriage is an hourglass, and while the sand is running out, he's taking wild risks in the lab, testing the patience of his by-the-book supervisor (Ellen Burstyn) and bossing around his mostly colorless subordinates. It's an obvious setup, very Hollywood Screenwriting 101, reminiscent of the early 90s subgenre of yuppie-prick-laid-low movies in which a workaholic who neglects his family is forced by tragedy to stop and smell the roses. Tommy is a Type A movie star hero -- a jerk whose dictatorial obliviousness is indulged because of his domestic tragedy, and because he's a handsome, sensitive genius. Would his wife Izzi's death have been any less of a tragedy if he'd been shown as someone who truly appreciated Izzi when she was healthy and spent quality time with her both before and after it became clear that she was a goner? 
"Death is a disease just like any other," he announces. "There is a cure. I will find it." Talk like this should have word balloons around it. But though I wish I could make a case for Aronofsky as an auteur who's a better director than dialogue writer, there are too many touches in The Fountain that irritate for reasons that have nothing to do with the words coming out of the actors' mouths -- like having Izzi write a novel (unfinished) that we ultimately discover is the conquistador segment of The Fountain. When workaholic Tommy finally gets around to reading it, he's so moved by it that he completely changes his attutude toward Izzi's illness, and begins confronting it rather than evading it. But the story is so reductive that it's vaguely insulting to Tommy, and on top of that, it confuses the issue. In the Spanish sequence, the Queen specifically asks the Conquistador to leave her in order to go on a quest, but in the present-day sequence, Izzi just wants Tommy to be at her side, even though she's too much the nobly suffering spouse to come right out and say so. You have to wonder, did Izzi write this novel to let Tommy off the hook for spending all that time in the lab? 
Izzi's saintly, crinkly-smiling character (or lack of character) is a major problem. In the present day story -- and in the Conquistador story as well, where she takes the form of Queen Isabella -- she's held up as a Feminine Ideal, not so much a woman as an emblem of warmth and decency, suffering nobly and waiting in vain for her genius-in-denial hubby to catch up with her on the emotional evolution scale. During the film's first half, I kept hoping that Tommy's idealization of Izzi would ultimately be accounted for -- that her illness would not simply pull Tommy closer, but force him to see her as a flesh-and-blood person rather than a distant ideal of the Good Wife and the Good Life. No such luck. She's a symbol rather than a person and she remains so throughout. (Weisz isn't distinctive enough to suggest depths that aren't there in the script; like costar Jackman, she's skillful and likable but not especially daring.) The abstract quality of the Tommy-Izzy relationship drains the lifeblood from the movie. It makes you think the worst -- that Aronofsky doesn't feel what he's showing us -- because no true romantic would write a love story so disconnected from life as it's actually lived. 
The fulcrum of the present-day story is a scene where Izzi stops by the lab and asks Tommy to join her on a walk through the season's first snowfall. He refuses, of course, and we keep seeing his refusal replayed over and over throughout the picture; it's Aronofsky's version of the ferry boat monologue from Citizen Kane. But the specificity of this regret is unconnected to anything real; like the Izzi-Tommy relationship in general, it feels like a screenwriter's device. There's one shot in the present-day sequence that communicates the sense of love and grief and devotion Aronofsky seeks to conjure: a first-person POV shot of a smiling, healthy, flirty Izzi running away from the camera -- i.e., away from Tommy -- that's not tied into any specific event or situation. It's just an image in his mind, and it's nearly as powerful as some of the pastoral flashbacks in The Thin Red Line. 
But think of how much more powerful it would have been if we'd been given more time to observe Tommy without Izzi. She's in the movie continuously as a symbol, a ghost and a plot device, which means we rarely sense her absence -- and that's a catastrophic mistake, because absence is the fuel of grief. There should have been more small, lonely moments in The Fountain -- moments where we saw Tommy looking around at situations where he was accustomed to seeing his wife and then having to accept that she wasn't there anymore, or perhaps discovering seemingly insignificant objects that drove the reality of his situation home. (As Billy Joel sings in "Souvenir," "A picture postcard/A folded stub/A program of the play...") The image of a man smelling his dead lover's shirt in Brokeback Mountain is no less blunt than anything in Aronofsky's film, but it's so honest and recognizable, so real, that you can't help connecting it to your own existence and being moved. The Fountain has moments like that, but because Izzi isn't merely an abstraction, but an abstraction who never stops hanging around in the story and giving the hero advice and instructions ("Finish it"), you don't get a chance to miss her, much less grasp a loss so great that it would spur Tommy to spend centuries trying to undo it.
As in Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky builds toward near-simultaneous, parallel climaxes, but only one of the three really resonates -- an O. Henry twist in the Conquistador sequence that has a hint of Old Testament perfection; it grants the hero's wish (in all three segments of the story) while thwarting it. Jackman's expression is just right -- it mixes rage, shock and astonishment, and finally, a sort of beatific acceptance of the fact that he's part of something larger than himself, indeed larger than his species. But the hard-edged rightness of this climax is effectively cancelled out by the soupy conclusion of the 26th century storyline, a straightforward wish fulfillment lacking the ironic undercurrent that makes the end of the Conquistador section so right. The film's intricate structure -- images echoing images, situations repeated like pop song refrains -- at first seems open-ended and mysterious, and therefore promising. But that promise ebbs as the fortune cookie profundities pile up ("Every shadow, no matter how deep, is threatened by morning light"; "Our bodies are prisons for our souls"). Soon enough you realize Aronofsky isn't just trying to stimulate questions about the great imponderables, he's actually playing guru and giving you the answers, and the movie you're watching is essentially a store-bought bereavement card blown up to bigscreen dimensions. Oh, well; it's the thought that counts.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
An outline of a heartbreaker: Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain
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15 comments:
Excellent review (writing like someone with an intimate knowledge of what he's talking about) and one that essentially sums up my feelings about the movie: that Aronofsky's talents with his visuals, sound design, and score are impressive but primarily serve to dazzle the eye and not the mind. There is indeed a severe lack of irony in the movie, and despite the narrative complexities it really is a very straight-forward and simple lesson/statement film from Aronofsky - 'man learns to accept death'. Comparisons with Kubrick seem particularly inapt, because whereas 2001 was driven by awe and a dry probing into the unknown, this movie is driven by sentimentality and a sense of purposefulness. I would call it a movie with state-of-the-art visuals at the service of a junior-high concept.
I must have missed the 'straining after cosmic significance' of The Life Aquatic, which is probably another reason to consider it a failure.
Matt,
An outline of a heartbreaker indeed. Rarely has so much wounded staring yielded so little actual feeling -- and so much laughing into my sleeve.
I watched the film last night -- on DVD, which might admittedly have dulled the effect of some of the images, but seemed perfectly suited to the puniness of the themes -- and I was less inclined to give it the benefit of my many doubts than you, although I think your review is excellent. For me, the carefully calibrated compositions (this looks like that looks like the other thing) were all thudders, all the time -- they didn't so much prompt shivers of recognition as weary, borderline-contemptuous sighs. It's aesthetic arm-punching, and it hurts. The Fountain is likely to intoxicate those for whom "getting it" is less important than an honest appraisal of what "it" is --in this case, lugubrious, orange-tinted solipsism with special effects.
As for the implication that "New Spain" was conquered in a noble gesture of humanitatian empathy for the victims of the Inquisition (kneel before the beatific, hovering white man, witch doctor!) -- it's thoughless at best, but it's indicative of the teeny-tininess of Darren Aronofsky's perspective.
You knocked it out of the park, Matt. I've been following Aronosky's struggles to make this film for so long that I hardly had heart enough to criticize it in my own review. But you've done so beautifully, and with a great deal of sensitivity.
I thought about Bram Stoker's Dracula during those Mayan sequences too (I think it's a look that's inherent to any exteriors that are shot on soundstages in this day and age).
When I was trying to explain to a friend who hasn’t seen THE FOUNTAIN my problems with the film, how imagery and dialogue echoing through the three time periods are used to buttress the tripartite structure but fail to expand the film’s emotional resonance, he came upon the perfect description of this interesting but deeply flawed movie. It’s a magnificent piece of architecture, but you can’t imagine anyone ever lived in it and made it a home.
I think this emotional muddle is actually behind the reviews that call the film a perplexing head-scratcher. Leaving aside some odd, obviously symbolic crossovers between the stories at the end it’s not at all hard to figure out what’s going on. Even if you argue, as some have (not me), that astronaut Tom’s journey isn’t happening either, but represents Dr. Tom’s conclusion of Izzy’s novel, that doesn’t challenge the narrative much; like walking south to reach the North Pole, you reach the same destination eventually. But without any emotional fingerposts to guide us, the clear throughline can collapse to a maze. It’s the unmistakable stamp of human concern, of empathy, that makes expansive cinematic gestures connect, that can pull our grateful tears by showing nothing more than a distant shot of a man walking a dog or a slow pan along a building. In contrast, THE FOUNTAIN is full of shots of grief and suffering and a ghostly tattoo making poor substitute for a lost wedding ring, but I watched it all stone-faced; distantly intrigued by how the star pattern on the hospital room recalled the field of candles surrounding the queen, the lonely starlight that surrounds the space journey, but utterly unmoved.
And the flattened conception of Izzy as patient sufferer, I agree, is the central misstep.
“But think of how much more powerful it would have been if we'd been given more time to observe Tommy without Izzy.”
I’d have also liked at least some ire or even exasperation from her. She’s the dieing one; couldn’t she have called him out, as bitter and hectoring as only a lover can be, about his single-minded conflict with death, rather than using her novel or Mayan folklore as breadcrumbs to bring him to a 500-years-in-the-making realization that, you know, the kids who watch THE LION KING are trusted to pick up in a three-minute song.
“It's a movie comprised of indicators of emotions rather than actual emotions -- an outline of a heartbreaker.”
That’s about dead-on, I think. (As must you, seeing as you pulled the article’s title from here.)
In fairness to Aronofsky, one should admire THE FOUNTAIN for its ambitions, its lovely analog effects, and for the conclusion to the Conquistador storyline, one of the great moments of film I’ve seen this year, horrifying and transcendent. Regrettably, even fatally for a film that wishes so much to be a balm for grieving souls, it’s the only time the film moved me.
Though I have to agree with Jeff about THE LIFE AQUATIC, save the lovely moment when Murray reaches toward a televised image of his late friend and mentor and receives the tender mercy of a spark arcing to his finger.
Very nice review. The Fountain seems like the latest in a line of grandiose tableau-films that are beautiful but soulless. A few more that come to mind are 2046, Batman Begins, The House of Flying Daggers, and Soderbergh's Solaris. Peter Jackson is probably partly to blame; I'd also like to think it's due to Terence Malick's enduring influence, but even his recent work feels overwrought (although The Thin Red Line and The New World were still very good).
Matt:
A very thoughtful review, one of far too few where this movie is concerned. It pains me to see the jejune dismissals of the movie's fantasy elements as if they're inherently invalid rather than imperfectly achieved.
I think part of what bugs people so much about Aronofsky is his syncretic quasi-mysticism, the philosophy that science and religion, life and death, are not only linked but essentially identical -- a conclusion he to a certain extent forces rather than argues. (Requiem takes the same tack, only with addiction: heroin, diet pills -- what's the difference?) I suppose there is something a bit wishy-washy and New Age about it, but I find it intriguing and a little inspiring in an age when reason and belief are so often pitted against each other rather than being allowed to work in tandem.
You're right that the movie doesn't have much truck with life lived; D.A. is after Big Game and not afraid to show it. I don't think it means he isn't a true romantic, just that tactile realism is not his strong suit. If I had to guess, I'd venture that the lack of concrete evidence of Izzi's passing and Tom's loss in the present-tense segments is meant to be compensated for by the utter isolation of the floating-in-space stuff. You could hardly envision a more literal (or, okay, literal-minded) representation of the utter aloneness of grief than to stick the character on a floating patch of ground in the middle of the vastness of space. It's not painful to look at, the way the far more simple and elemental illustrations of absence you mention would be, which can probably be accounted for by the (I'm guessing) fact that Aronofsky's conception of what it's like to lose the person you love most in the world is theoretical rather than experiential. I did feel some of that pain come through the shot you cite -- the repeated, and unforegrounded shot of Izzi running away from the camera, a free-floating memory of much, much happier times.
For me, the importance of Izzi's unfinished novel is that Tom has to finish it himself. Tom wants, in all his incarnations, to obtain control over life and death -- to conquer the undiscovered country. But the flip at the end of the conquistador story suggests that there is no conquering death, only more fully understanding its place in the cycle of regeneration, which like most of the movie's philosophy can be interpreted in both spiritual and scientific terms. It seems to critical to me that, based on the way the ending plays out, we have to assume that the ending to the 15th-cen. story was written by Tom himself, based on understanding gained only at the end of his journey (which, true to the movie's circular form, becomes the beginning of it).
It's true that some of the ideas behind the movie are simple and boldly expressed, which makes them easy to mock (as the first commenter did). But while "man learns to accept death" may be an easy thing to say, it's a profoundly, almost impossibly difficult, thing to actually *do*. Most great art is, when you get down to it, about extremely simple things: life, death, love, loss, joy, pain, all that human condition stuff. It's making us feel it in a new and different way that's the tricky part. At least for me, THE FOUNTAIN pulls it off.
Sam: I agree when you say that "tacticle realism is not his strong suit," but I do think that's the missing ingredient that would have made it work for me.
That said, it's working for a lot of people. Like The New World, The Life Aquatic and other movies referenced in this comments section, The Fountain has gotten a fairly cool response from critics (with a few exceptions) but it's already building up a cult of partisans who love it intensely and think it's a misunderstood classic.
I should also say that during a press screening, I sat next to a critic I respect very much who warned me that this was a second viewing, and the first time prompted tears from start to finish. Second viewing, same thing. I felt a little uncomfortable sitting next to someone who was so powerfully affected by the movie when I was sitting there two seats away looking at my watch and making notes. But that's showbiz, and it probably bodes well for the movie in the long term.
Jeff and Bruce: The Life Aquatic was my number four movie of 2004, and each time I see it I love it more, and the annoying aspects (that damned pirate sequence) bug me less. And I was moved by the last third of the movie, particularly the descent into the deep to confront the leopard shark. The last three shots of the film are burned into my memory. Thinking about them gives me the kind of melancholy rush I wanted to get from The Fountain.
Also: At some point I should probably write an appreciation of The Life Aquatic, since I keep praising it in reference to other movies, and I get the impression it's not too highly thought of here. I think it's Anderson's most ambitious, emotional and complex movie, owing more to 2001 and Playtime than to his other films. It also conveys the simple message others have talked about here -- death is inevitable, it's a part of life, you have no control over it, accept it -- better than The Fountain, and better than Soderbergh's Solaris remake, for that matter.
Matt: I've had a similar reaction to LIFE AQUATIC but started from out-right hatred to a skeptical pleasure; I, too, need to work through my newfound appreciation on paper, I feel. Now, there's only one thing I really don't dig and it's Bill Murray trying to cry in the submarine accompanied by that Sigur Ros song. Much like your reaction to THE FOUNTAIN, it (still) doesn't hit me in the heart. Other than that, though, I've only grown to love the risks the movie takes, and for the most part, delivers on. Plus, I dig the pirate raid's loopy sense of humor. A year after I saw an advance screening I bought the Criterion disc and have watched it three times now at home, which has helped the movie, too, I think.
More about THE FOUNTAIN later. Simple answer: I liked it more than you despite its flaws.
Ryland writes, "Simple answer: I liked it more than you despite its flaws."
Having argued "con" at some length, I'm interested to hear some "pros" (besides Sam Adams', which was heartfelt but didn't budge me).
Burns and Dignan are doing their regular "Navel Gazing" column Tuesday, Nov. 28 -- it's usually a Monday feature, but holiday stuff got in everybody's way including mine -- and The Fountain is one of the titles they'll be squabbling about. Join me there if you want.
Glad to hear there's some sort of FOUNTAIN cult aborning -- it's not a perfect movie (we can all agree there) but the critical ass-whupping has been a little disheartening. As for heartfelt but unbowed, I'll take it. I'm increasingly dubious about the potential of changing people's gut reactions to works of art. Deepening appreciation of, providing different viewpoints on, sure. But when was the last time anyone got argued into liking something they didn't like? When I read a rave review by someone I respect of a movie that leaves me cold, I often wish I saw it the way they do. But like the man said, the heart wants what it wants.
I love THE LIFE AQUATIC's subtext, but I'm left flat by its text, which is to say I think it's saying very passionate and interesting things about the nature of filmmaking and the validity of artifice, but I don't care about the characters. Maybe it will float to the top of the DVD stack for a second viewing some day.
The jaguar shark scene in The Life Aquatic is a stunner -- the elusive beast's indifference to the man who'd come to define himself by searching for it is about as concise, lovely and unfussy a depiction of acceptance in the face of mortality as I'd ever hope to see onscreen. But I'm not a huge fan of the film, which I think is wobbly and uneven in ways that Anderson doesn't intend and features his only bad soundtrack selections (not bad songs in and of themselves, but in terms of how they're used). I agree with Matt that the last section is the best; it's the same way I feel about A.I.
And: In my earlier post, I meant to write:" The Fountain is likely to intoxicate those for whom "getting it" is MORE important than an honest appraisal of what "it" is" -- as originally posted, I was contradicting myself.
Matt:
I feel like jumping into this discussion regarding a movie that I admire but which I wished I loved more than I do.
Essentially, your review sums up most of my feelings about the film: alas, this isn't as rich a meditation on life, love, death and life-after-death as Tarkovsky's Solaris or 2001 are, and some of Aronofsky's imagery, while outwardly impressive, doesn't quite have the depth of feeling and meaning as images from those two films do---some of it is good-looking in the same way that magazine ad photos are good-looking.
But its sheer ambition and sincerity moved me at times even when it fell a little short of its overreaching goals. Aronofsky truly believes in what he's doing, and no matter how rightly or wrongly others may laugh at his ideas---call them "juvenile" or "stupid" or whatever---one can't deny the passion underlying the way he presents those ideas visually (even if, yeah, the dialogue's straining for poetry sometimes painfully shows). And hey, these are big issues he's tackling, and even if The Fountain may not measure up to 2001 (which I felt like Aronofsky was clearly trying to recall in this film), I think it's still done in such a way that it occasionally resonates.
And the climax of the 15th-century story is definitely a keeper, one of the most memorable moments I've seen in a movie this year---beautiful enough, perhaps, for me to overlook its shortcomings. (Personally, though: yeah, maybe the plight of Izzy's character and the effect her death has on Tom might have been more powerful if she had been made more of a flesh-and-blood character instead of merely an abstraction---but I guess I was able to accept her as an abstraction early on and understand what Aronofsky was trying for. Maybe I, as a moviegoer, have the same shortcoming he does: I'm not necessarily disappointed or left cold if I don't feel a particular emotion in my gut if I intellectually know what a director's trying to elicit. As you said, Matt, it's the thought that counts, heh.)
Oh, and did anyone else feel a little distracted by Clint Mansell's occasionally rather overbearing score? I loved the climax of the film, but Mansell's deafening insistence did spoil the effect for me a tad.
One more thing: other critics have called this Aronofsky's "folly"; I can't help but remember the opening of Pauline Kael's review of Bertolucci's 1900, which was the first time I had ever heard of such a term labeled to a particular kind of visionary epic movie---an "obsessive testing of possibilities," a movie in which an artist "becomes drunk on the possibilities of movies" and decides to make a huge epic in which he will "bring the word" to the masses. I think this fits The Fountain to a T, for the most part; I guess it's that obsessive quality that I responded to most of all.
Thanks for the plug Matt. Not to be a total boot lick but this is far and away one of the best pieces of writing I've read of yours since I began visiting the site. Quite an even-handed assessment of this really difficult and ambitious film that I'm still trying to come to terms with. Needless to say, tomorrow's column will not be this eloquent or memorable.
An impressive "outline". But your over-anaylse and in the process distance yourself from the very real pain and beauty on the screen.
A week or so after my mother’s death, after a period of rapid decline and heart-rending delirium, I saw this film with no foreknowledge of the story, and the pain and beauty were so cathartic I cried the tears I had yet to cry.
There is truth in this film, and like life itself, truth is never neatly packaged with a nice bow.
I am sorry but your betray a certain arrogance and glibness that should have been tempered by a degree of humility, when talking of a work that tries to encompass so much with such sincerity and humanity.
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