Ambitious Film Overreaches, has Great Moments

Rating: 4/10 (18 July 2013)

I've been impressed with director Darren Aronofsky ever since I saw his first, and very off-the-wall independent movie, Pi. Nobody else is filming on the themes Aronofsky does, and with The Black Swan he has since proved his value to Hollywood. He also has about the best name an auteur could be born with.
So when I saw The Fountain and was disappointed and watched it again, but it wasn't any better. A pre-Black Swan movie, The Fountain is ambitious, but it overreaches badly. It tries to tell three different stories about eternal devotion with the same couple playing out a love story in different settings and times. Unfortunately, it was too much for the resources he had. The result is a movie that has all the ambition of a student filmmaker trying to shoot "War and Peace," with exactly the kind of errors you'd expect him to make.
There's nothing wrong with the central plot of this movie, in fact it's an excellent romantic tragedy. A cancer researcher, Tom (Hugh Jackman) is desperate to find a cure for his wife, Izzy (Rachel Weisz) who has already accepted and embraced the inevitability of her death. Tom is obsessed with saving her, while Izzy only wants his comfort and love for the little time she has left. His tireless drive to save her ends up separating them. Great story, operatic and ironic, I loved it.
The problem comes in because Aronofsky adds two other stories. They both take place in different settings, different centuries, maybe even different universes.
One of them being a novel Izzy is writing, it at least has a loose connection to the central plot. The story is set in sixteenth century Spain and Central America. Jackman plays a conquistador, Tomas, and Weisz plays Queen Isabella (in a very inaccurate historical depiction) who sends him on a quest to find the Tree of Life. The Maya paradise of Xibalba, which is also a star, figures prominently in the book, and Izzy refers to it in the main plot.
Nothing in that plot was worthwhile, nor did it really connect well to the "real" Tom and Izzy. I also had an issue with Izzy's imbalanced historical research. I don't know why she, (and that is to say, the movie's writers) would research into so much into the Mayans only to get the 16th century Spanish so wrong. The conquistadors were some awful people, and making Tomas a heroic conquistador is to overlook the massive genocide they committed all for sake of telling a historically unbelievable romantic tale.
The third plot is more vague, because it seemingly takes place in the future where a pseudo-Zen version of Tom is taking the "Tree of Life," to the Xibalba star, that is, the Maya heaven. The shooting of the scene leaves no doubt the tree is really Izzy, symbolically depicted, and it is dying. The things connecting this to the other plots, the star and the tree, and of course, Jackman. This thread has metaphoric imagery but no plot or logical connection to the central storyline.
It's a beautifully shot scene, but slow, and hardly lit, giving you a long time straining your eyes to resent the incoherence with the real story. He's traveling through space in a kind of bubble terrarium living off the bark of the tree, which makes for a disturbing comparison to cannibalism. Wouldn't an easier way to the afterlife be to let it die? Unlike the conquistador plot, we don't the least explanation of what this is. Is this a science fiction maybe Tom was writing? He didn't mention it, and didn't have the time. Maybe it's Tom's unconscious narrative. Unless you're excited to see Jackman out-acting the hunk of wood at center stage, it's pretty boring, not to mention confounding. My question all along was who gave spaceman Jack this mission? Though these two parallel plots have some striking images, you almost can't see them because the lighting is so dark, probably to hide the poor production values. Apparently, the movie was supposed to have an $80 million budget but was made for a fraction of that. It shows. Actually, with the horror movie/film noir it doesn't show-- enough. This pretty much wipes out the color palate, and it somehow doesn't fit a romance story, even one this heartrending.
The Fountain might have been only a short subject without those two parallel plots, but it would have been a better movie. They add nothing but murkiness to the story. Without the funds he needed, I wish Aronofsky would have focused on the best plot he had.
In its favor, the film is well acted no matter which sequence it's in. Jackman and Weisz do a great job, and for many people, the acting, the beautiful, stirring score by Clint Mansell, and the occasionally- discernible, breathtaking images are enough for them to rate this film very highly.
Not for me. I'd say it's a 4/10 which is a major disappointment. But I could see how great it might have been.