"We spend our entire lives trying to become whole..."

Rating: 10/10 (27 November 2006)

Two thousand six has been a year of phenomenally ambitious cinematic excursions, and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain belongs right up there on the top of that list, in my opinion, along with The Illusionist.
It is astoundingly difficult - nearly impossible - to portray the unportrayable, but Aronofsky succeeds in doing just that in The Fountain, and he does it with breathtaking purity of vision and the surehandness of a master.
In his supremely down-to-earth interview with Capone from aintitcool.com (see link below), Aronofsky says, "The Fountain of Youth is one of our oldest ancient myths--if not the oldest myth--that people have been telling, because people have been coming up with stories how to deal with the fear of death. And, trying to find out the reason of why we're here and what is life and what is love. And what happens when you die. These are questions that people have been asking since the beginning of time. So, there's absolutely no way that this schmoe from Brooklyn is going to be able to answer them. That's not the reality here. For me, it's a film that's a journey and it's a trip and it's an experience through the meditation of a lot of these questions..."
As a writer and 'schmoe from Brooklyn' myself, I particularly appreciate what he's saying here. The journey of the two main characters/souls, portrayed magnificently by Jackman and Weitz, is indeed at the center of the film, which must have been excruciatingly hard to edit - a miracle in itself - but they got it right: it flows, from beginning to end, like a fountain, in a sublime, indescribably perfect circle.
The rest of the interview: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/30768