This movie is like jumping off the top of the Empire State Building. It's kind of a fun ride until the very end.

Rating: 4/10 (18 March 2011)

Watching this film is like taking a long, slow, scenic drive that ends with your car going over a cliff and plunging into a bottomless pit of stupid. Writer/director Darren Aronofsky takes the snippets of three baldly melodramatic stories and mushes them together to try and create something new and smart and deep. He fails on all three counts.
Tommy (Hugh Jackman) is a medical researcher trying to find a way to cure the brain tumor that is killing his wife Izzi (Rachel Weitz) when he happens to discover the secret of eternal life. Izzi is writing a novel about the embattled Queen of Spain (also Rachel Weitz) sending a brave and loyal conquistador (also Hugh Jackman) to find a mythical tree in South America that can grant eternal life. We're also presented with a bald and pajama-clad Tommy, after some indeterminate eternity has passed, flying through space in what appears to be a giant, novelty bowling ball with a tree growing inside it. He's taking the tree to a star that represented the Mayan afterlife where he expects Izzi to be reborn in some never explained way.
As a story that contrasts both the romantic and the practical pursuits of immortality with the end result of that pursuit, The Fountain isn't that bad. The individual plot threads are simple but direct and affecting. Aronofsky also crafts some marvelous imagery through the movie. But it's all fairly weak treacle that needs a big, mind-blowing ending to make it worthwhile.
To his credit, Aronofsky tries to pull off a big, mind-blowing ending. But like a cross-eyed cliff diver, he hits the rocks and he hits them hard. The conclusion of The Fountain isn't big, it's overblown. It's not mind-blowing, it's nonsensical. Instead of making you appreciate all that's come before, it makes you regret sitting through any of it. Aronofsky reaches out for meaning, but what he pulls back are two handfuls of hog manure.
I would have liked to have been there to see Aronofsky try and explain the conclusion of The Fountain to the actors, the producers, the marketing people at the studio and pretty much anyone at all. It would have been fun to see which of them pretended they understood what he was saying and which ones just let their eyes glaze over. It would have also been neat to see how many different BS explanations Aronofsky practiced in front of his mirror until he had one that he thought he could sell.
If you compressed The Fountain down into a half-hour, like it was an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, the cleverness of the premise itself would be enough to sustain the story. When you stretch it out to 96 minutes, however, it needs a lot more and Aronofsky doesn't provide it. The result is a crappy movie with extraordinary production values that's will only captivate budding cinematographers.