Death's Dominion
Director Darren Aronofsky finds treasure at the end of all things in "The Fountain." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: As creatively-charged, intricate meditation on life and death as probably has been filmed.
The Downside: Take it in with an open mind, or you won't be able to take it at all.
by Richard Harris
Astronomers have new evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope that a strange force was present in the universe billions of years ago. The force is called "dark energy." It's forcing the universe to expand at an ever quickening pace.
-NPR Morning Edition, November 17 2006
If there are two inevitabilities of concern to the human race, they are the certainty of death, and the certainty of trying to stave off a fate that is, in our still miniscule knowledge, the only force in existence that could be considered a "universal constant." Myths and legends have been built around the theme- Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein fought in a mad but humanistic frenzy to eradicate death, equating it with the sum of all of human suffering. Bram Stoker's Dracula, who gained earthly immortality, but at the cost of his soul. We recognize death. We fear death. And yet while no subject has more closely been scrutinized, pondered, and applied with spiritual and metaphysical meaning, we are still not closer to understanding it than early cavemen whose end could be as quick and certain as the strike of a free-range predator.
Our only hope, The Fountain suggests, lies not in cheating death, but understanding it. Like Babel, it presents multiple stories about different people with the same philosophical core. Unlike Babel, it manages to stir and conjure its existential fever dream into a coherent, almost operatic transcendent oneness whose madness and method will be debated and discussed as long as its impenetrable theme. Is The Fountain the story of one man living through the ages and grappling with the same mysteries of life or death? Or are they different, yet all portrayed by Hugh Jackman as a statement of the commonality of the human soul and endeavor, existing for the same purpose both in and out of time? If this sounds pretentious, it isn't- too many movies like The Fountain are impossibly labeled as being "too smart" or "above" audiences but are rather, in a deliriously ingenious way, dense and tangled and most importantly open-ended, their concept and meaning not only left to be deciphered, but to be supposed as well. The Fountain is a hard, cruel shock to any system lulled into accepting a diet of cinema that's passive and free of meaningful interpretation.
The Fountain spans three time periods, past, present, and future, and in all features one man who, for varying reasons, is out to conquer the secret of immortality, or at least stave off death. Starting in the 16th Century is Tomas, a Spanish conquistador who is compelled by both love and faith (Spain at the time is in the iron grip of the Inquisition) to travel to South America and locate the Biblical "Tree of Life," the one spot in many myths that serves as the genesis of all life on Earth. In the 26th Century, a zen-like monk who's turned his body into a running record of the passage of time travels in a crystalline bubble with a tree so delicate and powerful its hairs react to the slightest touch. He's a traveler, a pilgrim racing alone searching for Heaven and the afterlife in the heart of a dying star. And in the present, in the story that serves as crux and center for the other two, a neuro-researcher named Tommy Creo is driven to experimenting with compounds from a mysterious South American tree to find a breakthrough in brain cancer research before it consumes the fading light of his wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz).
Playing fast and loose with literal meanings is uncharted territory for Darren Aronofsky, the young Brooklyn wonder who has spent six years trying to get this impassioned polemic onto the screen. As adept at creating archetypes as he apparently is at adapting to others, Aronofsky sheds the urbanized, hip-hop rhythm that so rocked his career-defining films Pi and Requiem for a Dream and goes straight for a palette that could be described as avante garde Kubrick, if imagining such a thing were possible. If Pi was the story of one mathematician's search for Heaven inside numbers and Requiem was the story of four drug addicts' descent into Hell, The Fountain marks a completely different ball game, its view of the human race neither saving nor damning, but smothered under layer after layer of enigma of a universe that seems to grow, live, and renourish itself like any living being. In the same way, there is no one set or easy way to explain The Fountain, which to some may make it seem either shallow or affected, but gives it a sensible credibility in the face of a focus that defies explanation. This is the kind of movie that some say you're likely to get out of it what you put it- it doesn't reward impatience or idleness or a less than stoic acceptance of Aronofsky's vision of worlds that are dark, organic, muddy, and most of all lonely (many of the scenes of the film have a feel like they feature the last handful of people left on Earth). It does reward those who take it at face value as a filmmaker regurgitating oft-repeated questions in a context as bizarrely alien as it is invigoratingly original, or nothing but inter-looping strings of metaphor.
Jackman and Weisz are the Adam and Eve, two lovers throughout the three intertwined episodes. Not a small secret that Jackman was not the first choice for the role; it was originally Brad Pitt as point-man for a $75 million project, but dropped out to do Troy leaving one to wonder how this fanciful project would have held up under Pitt's tabloid sheen rather than Jackman's brooding persona. Unlike Requiem, The Fountain isn't much of an actor's piece, relying more in shifts in character (cold and ruthless 16th Century Jackman, impassioned-to-the-breaking-point 21st Centruy Jackman, and lamenting and expectant 26th Century Jackman) to push the drama forward, but either way it works because the whole is so completely seamless. Neither is the approach Aronofsky's script takes one-sided; while each variation of the Tomas/Tommy/Tom character is seeking the same thing, their motivations, ranging from guilt, reckless altruism, and a biting hunger for power and glory, differ, lending to each a different fate and a different lesson learned. Weisz's personas are equally multi-faceted, her Spanish queen Isabel seeking the Tree of Life as the final trump card to put down the ravages of ecumenical absolutism (who has the most authority to interpret the Word of God than one who truly controls eternal life?) while her modern doppelganger Izzi serves as the Greek chorus, the one clear-eyed observer who recognizes the life and death divide as the cyclical evolution of the universe.
The call-down, reducing The Fountain from a $75 major project to a $30 independent shot-in-the-dark serves it well, if only because it forces an already hyper-inventive filmmaker to ratchet things up, to try to occupy more and more stunning levels of awe as any real science fiction movie should with scrappier means. The smaller sets, more secluded cast add fuel to the film's feel of cold isolation and the distinctive non-CGI special effects, whether the rapid growth of a vaccine culture or the gold-streamed core of a nebula set it in an untouchable place outside the FX timeline. The color scheme, enhanced by Matthew Libatique's brilliant cinematography casts black shadows punctuated by brilliant, numerous bursts of yellowish light, meshes perfectly with the motif of hope through hopelessness, life persisting through death.
The Fountain is not a hard movie to "get," since every analysis is likely to be as valid as it is varied. This is not a simple film, and just my personal feeling I would have been offended with a movie that reached for such heights with artless means than one as knotty and unrelentingly ambitious as this, which at least gives a talented director like Aronofsky a chance to do what he does best. Some have, and will, dismiss it as a convoluted three-ring circus with nothing in the center. I think this is wrong, because from The Fountain I pulled a re-energized discussion of things churning just below the surface of just about everything that has propelled human history. This is not only Aronofsky's grief over the impermanence of life (no doubt, the modern tale of the doctor and his won't-go-into-the-night-quietly wife packs a wallop), but a recognition that things are the way they are for a reason. "Death is a disease," one character says, while another argues "Death is the road to awe." In The Fountain, both are correct, death not being the adversary, but an intangible component to a slowly unfolding universe, one that Aronofsky captures and frames it into a rough, splendidly illuminated work of art. A+
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