All Flesh Is Grass

Rating: 4/10 (6 November 2007)

It is said that God can reach any point of eternity at his will. In The Fountain Darren Aronofsky can reach none at all: his depicting of the present is maudlinly melodramatic, his flashbacks into the distant past are historically illiterate and his visions of the future are naively childish. He also made a bloody mess of world religions - sitting in a lotus position Buddha-like being ascending in a soap bubble just made me laugh. So I consider this movie as a black comedy of one joke - when at last the hero finds Tree of Life and applies its juice to his deadly wounds, he sees how wounds are instantly healed but then his flesh starts turning into the flowering grass: "For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass" (1 Peter 1:24) - so much for an eternal life. Then one may say that there still remains a beautiful cinematography, but to my great regrets it's mostly eclectic in the worst sense of this word.