There are only fleeting moments of intrigue peppered throughout Darren Aronofsky's pseudo-thinkpiece about love, eternal life, and...well, that's pretty much it. It's a one idea film that thinks it's a lot more interesting than it is.
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There are only fleeting moments of intrigue peppered throughout Darren Aronofsky's pseudo-thinkpiece about love, eternal life, and...well, that's pretty much it. It's a one idea film that thinks it's a lot more interesting than it is.

I give the man kudos for an interesting concept, however. Set in three different time periods (1500s Spain, 2000s America, and 2500s outer space), the almost-but-not-quite-a-story follows Thomas/Tommy and Isabella/Izzy, played by Hugh Jackman and Racheal Weisz. In Spain, Jackman is a conquistador on the hunt for the fabled tree of life for his queen (Weisz). Finding the tree which grants eternal life will save the queen from the threat of the Spanish Inquisition, or so we are led to believe. In modern times, Jackman is a medical research scientist trying to cure brain tumors, because his wife (Weisz) happens to be dying of one. Jackman is so consumed by his work that he lets the fleeting time he has left with his wife waste away, just as she does. In the far flung future, Jackman is a tai-chi loving, mediating bald astronaut in a freaky space bubble that's rocketing toward a dying star with a tree (Weisz...I think?) that keeps giving him visions of Izzy. Theoretically, this is all supposed to tie together into one overarching tale of love and eternal life. Theoretically, this is also supposed to keep an audience's attention for 96 minutes. These theories are proven incorrect rather quickly.

For starters, the tie-ins and overlaps between the timelines and stories are tenuous at best. The Spanish story is evidently a work of fiction devised by modern day Izzy in a manuscript she's been writing. The future tale is, for all intents and puroses, Aronofsky's way of masturbating onto film for significant chunks of the movie. There's no point to it except to have Hugh Jackman look crazy, talk to a tree who may or may not be a manifestation of his dead wife, and show a lot of pretty colors. Yes, the colors are gorgeous, but for the love of god, why am I looking at them? Why is he in the future? Why are they rocketing toward a dying star? What the hell is the deal with this space bubble?

Metaphors, man, metaphors! That's all The Fountain is--a long, twisting, irritating metaphor telling you, the viewer, that death, through love, brings eternal life. When we die, we live forever, so long as we are loved. Love transcends death, get it? Love. Death. Life. You'd think the ridiculously heavy-handed ending would have been enough to get the point across, but Aronofsky goes a few steps further by loading the film with too many visual ticks for any human being to ignore. He's walking down a darkened hallway, and there's a light at the end of it. Get it? DO YOU GET IT?!?! No? OK, how about we do it about five more times throughout the movie? NOW DO YOU GET IT?!?

One might be willing to put up with all the metaphorical sledgehammering if there were actually a story to care about, but there isn't one. I love artistic film making as much as the next guy, but if there isn't a story to care about and characters to latch onto, it's not a movie. And The Fountain has neither. Weisz sleepwalks her way through this whole movie, and Jackman, while admirable in spots, hams it up pretty rude, especially during the future sequences. It's not entirely the actor's faults. Aronofsky and writing partner Ari Handel leave these characters hollow. They're empty vessels, flung into situations that neither evoke the supposed tragedy of the story, nor provide satisfactory emotional resonance for two people that are supposed to be as in love as the story would like to have them be. Jennifer Connolly's emotionally broken drug addict and Keith David's sleazy drug pusher in Aronofsky's last film, Requiem for a Dream, made for more interesting lovers than these two deflated shells masquarading as characters.

Part of me wants to give Aronofsky credit for at least doing something different. The Fountain is nothing if not ambitious, and the message he wants to get across is a noble one. But for a film that's being considered high art by some, he does it in a pretty artless way, choosing to pummel the audience with non-stop metaphors and beautiful, yet pointless cinematography instead of building his artistry into something actually resembling a film with a plot, characters, and, above all else, coherence. Strictly for the super pretentious and let's-get-high-and-watch-something-trippy crowds.