The "Present" as linear and real -- Not!

Rating: 9/10 (3 February 2009)

I watched the Fountain recently to complete my Aronofsky phase. I enjoyed the movie. No doubt there are a host of important themes explored: timeless love, death, grief, acceptance, renewal and more.
I will watch the film again before I make a judgment about which, if any, of the three time periods is "real". But in skimming the many comments here (and in some select reviews from RT), I had a reaction to what seems to be the predominant interpretation of the film. Namely that the "present" in the film is the "real world" and the past and future scenes are fiction.
The commentators that argue that only the scenes set in the "present" in the Fountain are "real" (and the past and future scenes are all from Izzy's book as finished by Tom) are based on the premise that the present scenes are grounded in reality as opposed to the fantastic flights of fancy of the Conquistador and Space Bubble scenes (which are, again, all fiction from Izzy and Tom's pens).
I question that assumption.
To me, the "present" scenes are no less riddles and symbolic than the other time periods.
Consider that in the "present" the film returns no less than three times to a moment of choice: Izzy comes to Tom's office door to tell Tom that the first snow has arrived and invites him to walk with her.
The first time, Tom (ever the committed scientist) decides NOT to walk with his terminally ill wife (who apparently has only days to live) but instead brushes her off, somewhat brusquely. Hmm. Interesting choice. Tom is pretty obsessed, you say.
Tom does this because a monkey has its chest cut open awaiting experimental surgery and Tom just NEEDS to operate on one more monkey (at the rate he appears to be going through monkeys, it is unclear why he thinks this surgery will be any different from the countless ones before it). OK, well and good.
But what happens next? The surgery is going badly -- so Tom just happens to remember that strange tree bark sample in the lab (from Central America, no less. Interesting coincidence...).
With the precision of a supercomputer, Eureka!!! Tom intuits from thin air that the molecular structure of this forgotten tree bark will fit perfectly (like lovers "top and bottom") with the monkey's bio-chemistry. The computer instantly confirms what Tom somehow worked out in his head on a timely whim outside the operating room. Really?
So, like any other irrational (bordering on mad) scientist, Tom gives the wonder drug to the monkey -- which turns out to cure aging. But Tom's preoccupation with his dying wife is so strong that he dismisses the discovery of the single most important medical breakthrough in history. Why? Because, while the monkey is now hopping happily around having literally been restored to youth by the magical, mysterious tree bark (from Central America), the monkey's tumor is not in remission (no, Tom should have waited a day or two to find that the drug also cures brain tumors).
And, having discovered and then ignored the cure for aging, Tom's wedding ring disappears into thin air in a sterile pre-op room (a ring that we already know has heavy symbolism).
Yep, it's all reality in the here and now!
Later in the film, Tom revisits that decision point again, in an apparent flashback. To walk in the snow with my dying wife or conduct the medical experiment that leads to a miracle cure, but not soon enough to save my dying wife; that is the question. Tom makes the same decision -- open up that monkey.
But the third time, Tom makes a different decision. He pushes past the breathless co-worker yelling about the monkey on the operating table. Instead, this time Tom simply goes with Izzy for a walk in the snow.
If Tom takes this path, presumably there is no tree bark miracle cure for the monkey. And much of the supposedly "linear" and "real" story of the "present" (for example, the internal strife with the lab staff and his boss about the discovery of the miracle cure) goes Poof.
Indeed, why would Tom later rave at Izzy's funeral that he was going to cure death? If the first decision point was "true" then Tom has already stopped aging and brain cancer (at least in one monkey -- not a bad start!) I like the idea that Tom simply decided to walk in the snow with his dying wife. They spent the moment together and the "miracle monkey cure" branch of the story is just as much magical realism from Izzy and Tom's book as the past and future scenes.
Or perhaps Tom didn't walk with Izzy in the first snow, but only later wishes that he had.
I certainly would have preferred to walk in the snow with my soon to be deceased wife over brushing the dying woman off, then watch her die a couple of days later (and only then to find out mere moments after her death that a cure was at hand). That path leads to a very cruel "reality" -- as if losing a spouse to cancer was not bad enough.
I don't know which path Tom chose, but either way, the "present" is just as filled with trap doors and paradox as the rest of the film.
None of The Fountain is "real". It's all fiction.
In the end, the film may not be anything more than Aronofsky having some fantastic, but disparate ideas, which he melded together in a Romance/Sci Fi genre to explore the themes mentioned above.
A lot of acclaimed magical-realism novels are based on less.