Beautifully haunting and wonderfully bizarre, but its ambitions weigh it down, along with its clinical and distant approach to the characters

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2006)

Visually stimulating but frustratingly disconnected from its viewers, The Fountain establishes director Darren Aronofsky as one of our most daring and adventurous directors  but his ambitions are ultimately what cause The Fountain to sink beneath its own heavy-handed pretensions.
Aronofsky has a way of making the most everyday events thrilling and beautiful, but his clinical approach to the characters of the film  portrayed by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz  creates a cold distance. A film such as this requires us to invest our emotions in the characters, which is impossible to do when they are so haphazardly presented. While the art sequences are mesmerizing, every time Aronofsky spends time focusing on his characters the movie hits a brick wall and becomes incredibly tiresome.
The fragmented story structure certainly doesn't help much in this regard. While it is no doubt an excuse for some awe-inspiring visual creations, every time Aronofsky cuts to another storyline more distance is drawn between the audience and the characters in the movie.
The plot, if you can follow this, involves a driven doctor (Jackman) trying to develop a cure for death. He claims it is just a disease, like anything else, and that he will be the one to give humans infinite life.
He is not driven by greed  his wife (Weisz) is dying of cancer and so he feels obligated to deliver her a cure.
Meanwhile, the film veers off onto two different paths  one involving a Spanish conquistador and his quest for the Fountain of Youth, the other about the doctor from the first storyline (I think?) being trapped in a bubble in outer space with a dying tree (which his wife is apart of because it grew from her corpse  yes, honestly) and his struggle toummpreserve the tree and himself so they can live together forever.
The film's soundtrack, composed by Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream), is perhaps the highlight of the entire picture. Mansell is quickly establishing a name for himself as one of Hollywood's greatest composers.
And certainly the movie will wow audiences looking for something pretty. But it is not a very enjoyable experience, for the most part, and the scenes involving human conflict dragged on seemingly forever.
And so as an art-house picture this is wonderfully bizarre, beautifully haunting and utterly captivating; I just wish Aronofsky had chosen a film that did not require more emotional involvement than he was willing to develop.