A dud

Darren Aronofsky is not for emotional lightweights. In is film Pi a super genius mathematician whose talents seem to stem from a brain abnormality performs surgery on himself with a power drill. Requiem for a Dream is the bleakest film I have ever seen and among one of the most beautiful; it can rend the heart while pleasing the eye.

I had high hopes for his latest film The Fountain. These hopes were never met.

Dr. Tom Creo (Hugh Jackman) works in a NIH lab performing testing of various substances on brain tumors. His wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) has the same kind of tumor he is trying to cure. This is the main storyline of 3. The second of the narratives has Mr. Jackman playing a conquistador and Ms. Weisz playing Queen Isabela of Spain. In this narrative, Jackman goes on a quest to find The Tree of Life, whose sap will grant the imbiber eternal life. The third storyline is bizarre. A bald and meditative and self-tattooing Jackman shares a bubble with what appears to be a dead tree. This bubble moves toward a nebula where he hopes to revive the tree. The Netflix sleeve described this narrative as centering on a 26th century astronaut (nothing in the film actually says this).

Plot spoilers in the analysis

Ok, the analysis of this film is so difficult that this is the fourth attempt.

The narratives fit together, but in such an indirect way that it was only through writing this portion three previous times that I came to understand how it works. Despite figuring this out, the film is still not successful.

The main storyline has Tom Creo trying to find a method by which he can cure the type of brain tumor that is killing his wife. He gets the idea to try the substance from a rare tree discovered in Guatemala—the question is where the idea came from (either it is blind luck or reincarnation). The substance from this tree causes the brain in the monkey test subject to go through significant reverse aging; the problem is that it does nothing to the tumor. His colleagues are all excited about the reverse aging aspect while Tom cannot see past the tumor.

Izzi writes a book called The Fountain. The subject is a Mayan creation and recreation myth and the Spaniards intent on finding the Tree of Life that is part of their creation story. The Mayan myth is that the creator of the Mayan civilization died, was buried, and insisted that a tree be planted over his body—the tree of life. The Mayan’s also looked to a specific nebula as the place of their going after death and responsible for their recreation.

Here is where the symbolism half works. While reading the book, Tom either “remembers” the time centuries before when he was a conquistador on a mission from a Queen Isabela (his wife Izzi) besieged by the Inquisition, or he just casts himself and his wife as the main characters in her story. Either way you look, the symbolism ultimately fails.

Without saying a word as to why, Tom abruptly stops caring about the brain tumor issue and focuses on the anti-aging issue. The reason only makes sense tangentially. Despite corrupting test data and basically being an enfant terrible and generally obsessed with saving Izzi, he apparently has a fall-back plan: to stay young for as long as it takes to bring Izzi back.

After Izzi is buried, Tom plants what appears to be a sweetgum ball over her casket. This is the opening of the Mayan myth. Here the viewer has to decide whether to infer a significant part of the storyline or to dismiss this inference and view the astronaut Tom as just a stupid story. If you accept the inference, then you have to accept that Tom kept taking the substance to keep him alive for as long as it was going to take. You must also infer that he is able to transfer about a quarter acre of land containing the tree, now essentially dead, that had grown over Izzi’s grave. Then you must infer that he goes to the nebula worshiped as the afterworld by the Mayans on the vague hope that the Mayan belief system truly worked. There is zero indication that it does.

The amount of mental energy I have so far spent on the plot of this film far outstrips any entertainment value. The special effects weren’t special and the camerawork and things like lighting and the like, which Mr. Aronofsky used so well in earlier films is almost completely lacking.

Every great director has at least one dud—I sincerely hope that Mr. Aronofsky is great and rather than having just one success, that he has many more to come and that The Fountain is his one dud.

Recommended:
No