The Fountain
Review by Fritz Esker
As I’ve mentioned before, 2006 has not been a particularly stellar year for films. Oddly enough, there have been several home run hitters (Martin Scorcese, Spike Lee, the late Robert Altman, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, among others) who have released films this year that ended up ranging from disappointing to good-but-not-great. The Fountain, the new film by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream), can be added to that list. It has its undeniable merits, but the parts don’t add up to a completely satisfying whole.
There are three stories at play here. One involves Tommy (Hugh Jackman), a cancer researcher feverishly working to find a cure for his dying wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz). Izzy is a novelist and one of the film’s narratives follows the storyline of the novel she is working on, a story about a conquistador (also Jackman) searching the new world for a tree that holds the fountain of youth. The final storyline has Jackman hurtling through space with said tree towards a nebula in what appears to be a giant snow globe.
This sounds confusing, but it’s really not too difficult to get what Aronofsky is striving for here. Granted, at first it’s more disorienting than necessary, because Aronofsky chooses to start the film with the conquistador and space storylines, as opposed to the Tommy/Izzy storyline, which would seem to be the more natural starting point. What all storylines get at is how death is a natural part of our life cycle and should be viewed more as a rebirth than as an end. Because of this, all efforts people make to cling desperately to life on Earth end up being futile and end up distracting us from the worthwhile moments we can still have in this life. The Tommy/Izzy story captures this message very effectively, as Tommy the cancer researcher spends long hours in the lab trying to find a cure for his dying wife. But in working such long hours trying to keep her alive, he ends up missing out on quality time he could have spent with his wife in her dying days. The affection between Jackman and Weisz’s characters is palpable and much of this storyline is touching.
However, the conquistador storyline does not work as well. It relates to the central relationship, but it is not as moving and effective as the present-day story. It bogs down the film’s momentum and lacks the emotional core that the modern story has. The film would have been better suited to spend more time developing the relationship between husband and wife. Still, it is hard to fault a talented filmmaker for overreaching. After all, overreaching is how a lot of great films get made. The Fountain does not entirely work, but parts of it are still quite interesting and Aronofsky remains a filmmaker to be reckoned with.